Week before last, I read the group of commentaries, Web 2.0: Where will the next generation of the web it take libraries?, but I felt it required more time than I had then to write down my thoughts about it. I still feel that way! I hope to write more when I finish the 23 Things. I found Dr. Wendy Schultz's article especially interesting. Judging from the name of her company, she seems to be a futurist, and they always fascinate me. Our society is so future-oriented that people can actually make a living by predicting what will happen, based on what has happened in the past and is happening now.
Or maybe it's something else that enables this career path, something more over-arching in human nature: a desire to know what lies ahead. Are futurists the modern-day equivalent of oracles, astrologers, diviners, psychics, or fortune tellers? Are they just telling us what we want to hear? For example, perhaps Dr. Schultz formulated Library 4.0, the neo-library, in order to appeal to those of us who grew up and worked in Library 1.0. Since it's unlikely that any of us will live to see whether this prediction comes true, why not comfort us with a retro-vision of the library as a retreat from the hustle and bustle of the outside world? I would certainly prefer to imagine this scenario, than to think that, in the future, libraries will disappear altogether!
Taken together, the 5 articles give a comprehensive overview of Web 2.0's potential for libraries. More later...
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