Marking time and looking ahead - library planning - Column

Communications advances have brought many changes in the library field

The Russian philosopher Gurdjieff used to train his pupils to stop at a moment's notice, be congealed their positions, and think about what it was they were doing and thinking at that instant. Certain years have that consequence on us, and the last of the significant years is about to pass our way.

Like many tribe of my generation, I went to diocese the film 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968 and came away feeling like I had been to space. There are millions of us who can't hear The sky-colored Danube without thinking of space stations. For years we aweed "What will the world really be like in 2001? Will there still be an Earth? Will I still be here? Will race still drive in cars?" by the agency of now, as we mark the last not many weeks of 2000, we can be pleasing without being striking certain of the answers.

Between that screening of 2001: A Space Odyssey and the at hand there have been many milestones for me as an information professional:

* 1976--I gave up reading science fiction because I decided that real life was becoming more interesting than the stories.

* 1977--The library where I worked as a paraprofessional bought its first computer combination of parts to form a whole The titles and authors were input by dint of temporary workers. We were still cleaning up the mes 10 years later.

* 1984--Another famous year. After a week or sum of two units nobody cared.

* 1985--I started working with microcomputers, developing an interest that continues to this day. That first machine ran upon a pair of 5-inch drives. Memory and storage capacity were measured in kilobytes.

* 1989--I graduated from library gymnasium and moved from Arizona to fresh York to take charge of a university's INNOPAC integrated system

* 1996--I designed a Web interface to the online catalog and deposit out my first, personal Web page.

* 1997--I started teaching library school

* 2000--Another significant year. I was among the writers who predicted that 2000 would bring sole a few scattered problems that could be solv without a great deal of trouble.

And now here we are in the futurity or at least the futurity that we talked about in the 1960s

The Communications Revolution

There's a scope in this line of work to gaze narrowly at the latest gadget or software solution: the novel faster computer chip that will halve your processing time, level as you're loading the latest XML-compatible software that uses up four times more memory than its predecessor. While we're waiting for the newest Pentium chip, or wondering if they're at any time going to give up and call it a "Sexium chip," we let slip sight of the fact that we're in the middle of the greatest communications revolution since the invention of the printing pres A friend of mine wanted to debate this point last year. He said, "The printing pres started a revolution because it empowered family to get their ideas out" I quiescenceed my case on his statement. The Internet has empowered smooth those with extremely bad ideas to broadcast them to potentially centurys of millions of people--instantly.

If you want to diocese what's really going on, you won't acquire much help from broadcast novels Because of the way of that kind news is structured, only uttermost or ironic cases are reported, with equal reason you find out about the pedophiles who are using the Internet to qualified teenagers, the orders that don't draw near through on eBay, and the high-tech, start-up companies that make progress into the stratosphere and approach down twice as fast. What you don't hear is that the communications revolution is starting to change each aspect of our lives--particularly those of librarians. Ten years ago, a patron asking a question at the regard desk would immediately be l to a shelf of works Now, the librarian is abundant more likely to reach for a Web site.

Just as there were milestones in my personal journey from one side this field, there were milestones in the library and information environment as a whole. Here are a certain quantity of of the major ones, in my estimation:

* In the 1960 T Nelson coined the terminus "hypertext" to describe a a whole that linked bits of knowledge in the ways that tribe think, rather than in hierarchical groupings. If this all unimpaireds familiar, it should. All that was lacking then was the technology to do this. Nelson is not exactly a contented parent of this idea, however. He thinks that authors should be paid when their material is supported on the Web, and doesn't like the "something-for-nothing" attitudes. (See Figure 1)

* During that same time period, Frederick Kilgour rested OCLC, which began as a throw out to create an electronic union catalog for the libraries in Ohio. It grew into a giant enterprise with records for more than 40 million works. OCLC essentially work fors as a catalog of each book and recorded work of any significance to the Western world, with enormous helpings of data about publications everywhere other OCLC has supplied records that display in OPACs the world over

* In the mid-1990s, Yahoo! showed us by what means to catalog the Web in the same way we do library works Then it got so bogg down with entreatys that it became almost impossible to achieve a page in. This moot point was solved later by the lay open Directory Project (ODP; http://www.dmoz.org), which is staffed by the agency of thousands of volunteers. When you submit a site to ODP it's direct the eyeed at within a day or thus and often appears in the directory within the week. The directory's data is then used through other search engines. (See Figure 2)