The Source: news about digital libraries and library innovations from around the web

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Future Reading: Digitization and its discontents

From the New Yorker website

Google’s projects, together with rival initiatives by Microsoft and Amazon, have elicited millenarian prophecies about the possibilities of digitized knowledge and the end of the book as we know it. Last year, Kevin Kelly, the self-styled “senior maverick” of Wired, predicted, in a piece in the Times, that “all the books in the world” would “become a single liquid fabric of interconnected words and ideas.” The user of the electronic library would be able to bring together “all texts - past and present, multilingual - on a particular subject,” and, by doing so, gain “a clearer sense of what we as a civilization, a species, do know and don’t know.” Others have evoked even more utopian prospects, such as a universal archive that will contain not only all books and articles but all documents anywhere - the basis for a total history of the human race. In fact, the Internet will not bring us a universal library, much less an encyclopedic record of human experience.


Betsy Wilson’s Crystal Ball: New Directions for Libraries

From the Berkeley, University of California website. Recorded on the 16 October 2007, 08:30PM, Morrison Library

Betty Wilson, Dean of University of Washington Libraries - I am going to imagine the future of research libraries by taking a look back, gazing into the crystal ball, and suggesting four areas for strategic investment. The investment areas include: 1) collaboration and collective action; 2) culture of assessment; 3) the global research library; and 4) creating a workplace of choice.
Listen or watch online. Download as a podcast.


Networked Media of the Future (Note: PDF)

From the (CORDIS) Community Research and Development Information Service website

This white paper is intended to identify future research challenges in Networked Media. Availability of information at all places is becoming crucial to the development of modern day society. In addition, information is already available in the form of various media such as audio, video and text. Furthermore, in the future, all the elements of the media value chain will have a network capacity attached to them. Not only does it mean that all devices and multimedia content will be network-enabled but it also means that users and providers will participate and collaborate actively in a community network. The paper focuses on three main axes of future progress – true broadband support, personalized media, and distributed control.