Mar
Libraries of the Future
Filed Under (General) by elearning4bradford on 24-03-2010
Yesterday I travelled to the second Future of Academic Libraries meeting and workshop event at Aston University where we further developed some scenarios for how the library might look in the year 2050. Picking up from where we left off at the first event in London in February the key drivers were again useful in shaping the discussion. An excellent graphic had been produced by Cartwright/SAMI that showed the results of our ‘backcasting’ exercise which essentially was a process of identifying the key ‘moments’ of the last 50 years. Yesterday’s event was opened by Professor Brian Collins FREng, FIET, FBCS, FIOP, RCDS whose keynote was interesting and thought provoking particularly his view of some of the future technologies such as the semantic web, cloud computing and, rather scarily, the emergence of synthetic staff. This was followed by a series of workshops that ranked the global drivers and questions then plotted these on axes of certainty to uncertainty and high-impact to low-impact. After a pleasant lunch during which I chatted to Marian Miller from Glasgow Caledonian University about her Saltire Centre, we again formed work-groups and developed scenarios in outline to be taken forward to the next stage. The day was concluded with a presentation by Gill Ringland which outlined the use of scenario building through some case studies. Next up will be a series of smaller workshops over the summer. For more information on the project click here
