Vision for the Future

Time and place. We humans have worked very hard to obviate these two controlling factors in our lives over the last twenty years. Time governed when we could do certain things … stores and businesses closed (meaning services were unavailable), news was packaged in at best daily digests of information (arriving neatly on our doorstep each day or on our television screen at night), and processes such as research were understood to take considerable amounts of time often involving painstaking collation of data culled from multiple places and times.

Place exercised a powerful level of control over us … imagine the world (not-so-long-ago) without cell phones, PDAs, laptops, iPods. Each of these gadgets serves to break place — rendering it useless to prevent us from accomplishing the task at hand. Underlying these gizmos is the network — always on — always there. Sinking deeper into our psyche as our reliance on it grows like a weed. Today, we live in rural Iowa with up-to-the-second access to world events (delivered to us by Twitter … not the news media); we expect to be able to purchase any item at any time (from nearly any vendor); read whatever we wish, written by whomever we like, whenever we like, wherever we like; communicate via voice, text, media with anyone we like at any time, no matter where we are. The term “3G” (and rising “4G”) may be underestimated in our society for the profound change relatively ubiquitous and high-speed data networks brings to our lives.

This revolution brings with it changes in our culture and behavior. Google and its ilk bring us closer to our own sense of expertness … nearly any one can answer any question nearly any time from anywhere. Wikipedia and its ilk bring us pretty darn good explanations of the world around us and minimize the need for us to retain much in our own brains. The network now does it for us. Libraries and other service providers see a marked trend away from mediated services. Users want to be able to service themselves whenever, wherever. The expectation that someone should have to physically honor time and place to go somewhere to do something seems antiquated and somewhat quaint. And to have to rely on someone else to mediate a service seems a serious speed bump on the superhighways of our lives. We seek to squeeze a little bit more out of time, and seek to be ruled less-and-less by place.

I believe these are facts, and they are not presented in an attempt to cast these changes positively or negatively. Unequivocally they bring tremendous positive advantages, and they simultaneously carry significant costs. In the past twenty years the network has transformed fundamentally our relationship as people with information and how we live our daily lives. This bus left the station long ago. The shoulder of the information superhighway is becoming increasingly cluttered with the wrecks of many information-based industries (music, film, publishing, journalism to name a few) struggling to grapple with the new reality of the network. Such examples show us the dangers of sustaining a business model in information itself. The network fully enables information to do what it has always wanted to do: be free. Sustainability lives elsewhere for these industries, and I believe some information-based industries still have the opportunity to chart that new course, libraries and information service organizations among them. The path lies in defining ourselves in the human relationship to information … not the information itself. The path lies in creating tools to connect people to information, and working to equip them to be more self-sufficient in their information work … not controlling, or in many cases even providing the information. These relationships with information are intensely valuable, provided they are prioritized and intentionally cultivated.

This is both a confirmation of what libraries and information service organizations have always been as well as a striking new way of conceiving of our work. Our identity and value should come less from what we have or control and more from what we do, and honestly often how well we get out of the way to allow the relationship between user and information to develop and grow. Relationship, interface, design, and simplicity are of hallmark importance in creating the experience. Change is fundamental, essential, and a permanent part of our world. In fact, shepherding and leading change in how users relate to their information is exactly where we need to be. It is no surprise that institutions founded on bedrock of stability, preservation, and permanence see the fluidity and flash of the network and all it brings as disruptive and in some cases subversive. Yet the network is fact. The dream of the preponderance of human knowledge on the network is not far-fetched and is becoming reality today. Knowledge is truly separating from media and artifact, leaving many of our institutions looking more akin to museums than vibrant information centers.

Some corporations understand the value of this relationship and are bold enough to position themselves to take strong advantage from it. They are advancing our relationship to information in the context of the reality of the network. The investment we make in the human relationship to information does and will continue to pay a dividend. Like the network, the human relationship to, fascination with, and reliance upon information transcends time and place. Therein lies the future for information professionals, and the information profession itself. The question then remains: are librarians and other information professionals also advancing the relationship of our users to their information? Or are we seeking to define ourselves by the information we think we maintain and control? Are we ready for the consequences of either of these paths? Are you?

In 2009-10, LIS will begin as an organization to more systematic incorporate future-based thinking into our workflow in order to move organization to where we want to be on the curve of change proactively. We seek to define our direction, not be dictated by the forces affecting us from outside. We will over time develop strategic thinking on a wide variety of issues facing our profession today. Our focus therefore for the future is the future. I have a feeling we’ll be there before we know it …