Wednesday, August 11, 2004

The Library's Future

I remember seeing this a while back ago and was reminded of it from an email. Scince I have a blog, I will bring it to your attention. The 2003 OCLC Environmental Scan: Pattern Recognition Report looks at major issues and trends facing OCLC, libraries, museums, archives, and others, happening now and in the future. The report provides a high-level view of the information landscape, intended both to inform and stimulate discussion about future strategic directions.

Topics include:

    The Social Landscape - Major society and consumer trends such as moving to self suficiency, satisfaction and seamlessness.
    Economic Landscape - Major worldwide economic trends affecting libraries such as slow economic worldwide growth, worldwide spending in education and libraries, shared infrastructures, and public funding.
    Technology Landscape - Major trends in technology shaping the library's future such as structuring unstructured data, a distributed software environment, moving to open-source software, security, authentication and digital rights.
    Research and Learning Landscape - Major trends affecting research and learning such as reduced funds, explosion of e-learning, lifelong learning, pattern changes in higher education learning, respositories, information access, and the flow of scholarly information.
    Library Landscape - Major trends affecting libraries such as staffing, emerging roles, accommodating users, content, preservation, funding, and collaboration.
    Future Frameworks - Future trends within the framework of libraries such as a pattern indicating a decrease in guided access, disaggregation, collaberation, and other future frameworks.

    This report is very interesting but also very long. It is available in HTML (allows you to browse and click on each section title).

    A June 2004 webcast related to this topic is also available on their site. It is approx. 2 hours long so bring your popcorn and soda and turn off your phone.

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    The Krafty Librarian has been a medical librarian since 1998. She is currently the medical librarian for a hospital system in Ohio. You can email her at: