Introduction

Stuart Ferguson

A critic might say that a book called Libraries in the twenty-first century is bound to be a slim volume – after all, libraries and librarians are soon to be things of the past. Those who saw the 2002 film version of HG Wells’s The time machine may recall the Vox System in the New York Public Library, a holographic cyber librarian from 2030 that can access every database on the planet and interact with library clients to provide any information they require. It even produces a treatise written by the time traveller himself (assumed to have died in 1903) on the creation of a time machine, although when the time traveller asks about the time machine he is referred to HG Wells’s novel, in one of those frustrating logical loops with which users of the world wide web are all too familiar. This wonderful, if flawed, librarian of the future also remembers its customers. When the time traveller finds himself 800,000 years in the future, in the world of the Eloi and the Morlocks, he stumbles across a much diminished holograph, bemoaning the fact that it remembers everything – ‘I even remember you’, it comments, ‘Time travel – practical applications’ (2002). Despite the obvious limitations of the cyber librarian, the image is a powerful one – not simply on account of the near-omniscience of the cyber librarian, but also because of the personalised service.

It would be easy to dismiss the romanticised imagery as so much science fiction except that, as with some of the genre, the technology is not all that far away – at least it is not far removed from the screenplay (although the cyber librarian was not part of Wells’s early twentieth-century vision). We do presently have holographic representations, after all, and we also have relatively easy computer access to a wide range of resources in digital formats that can be stored, manipulated and transferred across telecommunications networks by computers. Indeed, many pre-digital resources stored by libraries and other collecting institutions in paper and audio-visual formats are in the course of being digitised or converted into digital formats. In a recent symposium at the State Library of Victoria, for instance, Mary Jane Stannus of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation announced that the ABC would digitise 30,000 one-inch tapes in the space of three years, adding ‘we won’t have that format to deal with anymore, and then SP Beta Cam, SX Digi Beta Cam. So the problem that archives face with changing formats and having to keep them up to date’ (2006).

There have also been a number of attempts to digitise print books, the most famous being Project Gutenberg, and, while this particular book is being written, Google has embarked on a project to digitise as many as fifteen million books, in association with the libraries of Harvard, Stanford, University of Michigan, University of Oxford and, yes, the iconic New York Public Library. Even before Google itself was started, says co-founder Larry Page, the vision was to make ‘the incredible breadth of information that librarians so lovingly organize searchable online’ (‘Google checks out library books’ 2004). Librarians, who make as much use of Google as anyone else, can hardly help but notice the patronising ‘so lovingly’.

What of the cyber librarian, however? We do have what are occasionally called ‘cybrarians’ in some of our organisations. University of Queensland Library, for instance, did so, although its ‘Ask a Cybrarian’ link now takes clients to a more standard ‘Ask a Librarian’ service (University of Queensland 2007). These are human information professionals, however, working in a virtual environment, typically without face-to-face contact with clients. They are not computer programs and we are a long way from the New York Public Library’s futuristic Vox System – not altogether surprising since science fiction does contain a strong element of the fictional. It is true to say that artificial intelligence (AI) – the already old-fashioned sounding area of computer science that includes ‘intelligent’ systems – has not developed to the level of interactivity demonstrated in the film, despite the promise of expert systems research in the early 1990s. Nonetheless, elements of AI have found their way into software developments in other fields of computing and we see increasing interactivity in our information retrieval systems. Take, for instance, the intelligent agent (sometimes also called AI agent or autonomous agent), which can make inferences based on its memory and on its previous contact with its environment (inputs), thus learning from its environment and from past inferences. An example with which some people will be familiar is the customer-service agent, which uses natural language to interact with customers and allows them to state their intentions instead of having to search for information themselves on an organisation’s website (Barbuceanu et al. 2004, p.47).

Do librarians, or their ‘cybrarian’ counterparts, need to start retraining, before they go the way of the typesetter? In this collection the authors think not. Although there are examples of libraries being closed in the corporate sector and even in the school sector, the papers in this collection bear witness to a considerable role for libraries in the early twenty-first century. Anyone reading the chapter by Roxanne Missingham and Jasmine Cameron, for instance, cannot fail to be impressed by the fact that collecting institutions such as the National Library of Australia have harnessed information and communication technologies (ICTs) to create institutions that are far more ‘national’ in terms of delivery of service and sheer presence than ever their print-based predecessors could be. Their immediate future is certainly an exciting one. The public library described by Chris Jones in the opening chapter also remains a vibrant institution, which not only seeks to develop virtual resources and services, but also continues to provide an important physical space for local communities. Moreover, as Jake Wallis’s chapter on the wider social environment eloquently demonstrates, libraries are significant players in any attempt to counter the so-called ‘digital divide’ between information ‘haves’ and have-nots’ that some believe characterise our so-called ‘information society’. James Herring’s chapter on school libraries highlights the extent to which ‘information literacy’, which has been driven in the educational sector by librarians, is increasingly seen by educators as a central strand in the education of our children – and adults.

Libraries for the moment, then, seem highly relevant to their parent institutions and communities. This is in stark contrast to the vision of a senior library educator at Charles Sturt University, who in the early 1990s announced to a startled group of information technology (IT) lecturers that libraries would be dead by the year 2000, made redundant by the very ICTs they taught. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Is this a cause for complacency – yet another poor performance indicator for the profession of futurology? Library and information professionals are not rushing to retrain as futurologists but they are not complacent either. There are significant challenges facing them. The information environment in which they develop their services is growing ever more complex. They used to enjoy a relatively privileged position as major intermediaries (some would even say ‘gatekeepers’) between the individuals, organisations and communities they served and the world of (largely) print publications. This involved functions such as the following:

• analysing the information needs of clients, organisations and the community, whether these needs be educational, recreational or purely informational;

• developing collections of publications that meet their clients’ information needs;

• assisting clients find publications they may find useful by describing them (using elements such as publication details, physical description or subject descriptors) and developing appropriate resource discovery tools, such as library catalogues;

• assisting clients access publications by developing information services, products and systems such as reference assistance, document delivery and inter-library loans;

• managing library collections, including their storage, organisation, dissemination and preservation;

• instructing clients on how they themselves can address their information needs and make best use of the resource discovery and delivery systems developed by the librarians (a function sometimes called information literacy instruction); and

• evaluating the information services, products and systems they have acquired or developed.

These functions are still central to what many library and information professionals do but the information landscape in which they perform them is much more complex, for instance:

• clients served may not have physical access to their libraries, for instance, distance learning students in the...