Predictions from the
Magic Eight Ball
By Karen G. Schneider
American Libraries Columnist
Author of A Practical Guide to Internet Filters (Neal-Schuman, 1997)
Column for January 1998
Can we really know what's going to happen in the next year? Roy Tennant, project manager with the University of California/Berkeley's Digital Library Research and Development Department, thinks not. "I leave predictions of the future to fools and geniuses," he said, although "the problem is you don't know which is which until it's too late." But what fun is that?
Magic Eight Ball says: Show me the money! Out of 21 responses I received to an Internet request for predictions for 1998, 11 foresaw more fee-based information. The respondents saw this as both problem and opportunity. On the one hand, funding should help stabilize these sites, ensuring their continued availability, suggested Karen Kleckner, head of readers' services at Deerfield (Ill.) Public Library. Karen and others were also concerned, however, that as more content goes digital, fee-based services would widen the "gulf between the haves and have-nots," as David Wuolu feared. Electronic services often have a much higher buy-in than many very small libraries have traditionally been able to cope with. David, a reference librarian at the University of Minnesota, saw "consortial purchasing" as "the key to abating this trend."
Magic Eight Ball says: Commercialization is good or bad—Take your pick. You might predict that the responses I received about the commercialization of the Internet would be negative—and certainly I received a number of messages in which the Eight Balls predicted that "advertising is only going to get more intrusive on our screens," as Greg D. Schmitz, reference librarian at Oshkosh (Wisc.) Public Library, put it. Charles Anderson, associate director for public services at King County Library System in Seattle, offered a somewhat playful vision: Service providers would increase the advertising/content ratio to 80/20, which would inspire librarians to mount "free, public Web sites," similar to public radio and television, "supported by interminable subscription drives" powered by Java technology. A scary thought!
Some Eight Balls saw positive aspects to commercial information. J. Sara Paulk of Tifton-Tift County (Ga.) Public Library, who noted that many people feel they are "spending too much time in futile searches," sees opportunity for "libraries providing exclusive Internet services including doing the searching for a fee." Andrew Barnett, assistant director at McMillan Memorial Library in Wisconsin Rapids, Wisconsin, predicted (in addition to seeing more people—including him—playing Jeopardy online) "more free useful things." And once in a while, I predict, some resources will go from "fee" to "free"; I never thought I'd see Medline go public, for example, as it did this year through PubMed, a wonderful service. (Now if we could only convince the Census Department to follow suit—or would that be the McCensus Department?)
Magic Eight Ball says: Get it together! Andrew Barnett saw "more libraries expanding their Web site to include content, such as local authors and history," as well as more state subject guides compiled by librarians. Mary Lou Caskey of Mid-York Library System in Utica, New York, echoed this, adding "we have been in the mode of 'what can I get from the Internet?' Now I think we are moving into the 'what can we contribute to the Internet?' phase." Mid-York is already fulfilling Andrew's predictions by creating an online bibliography of Oneida County, including such favorite sons as Edmund Wilson and John D. MacDonald.
Magic Eight Ball predictions for software and hardware. Thomas Dowling, assistant director for library systems at Ohio State University, says that the World Wide Web Consortium (also known as W3C) and the Internet Engineering Task Force will publish version 4.0 of HTML and "declare it the final version." Meanwhile, Microsoft and Netscape will issue browsers that "fail to support HTML and introduce new, quasi-documented tags." This is a sure bet, since it has happened with every version of HTML published so far. Standards, schmandards!
Sure, computers will get faster and bandwidth will get cheaper; but will WebTV get "respect and customers," as Andrew Wohrley, an engineering librarian at Auburn University Libraries, predicts? They've demonstrated they only need the latter to survive. Mary Lou Caskey predicts more thin clients (a sophisticated version of those "dumb terminals" we used to use) in libraries—a good bet, based on the number of times I heard "thin clients" murmured at the ALA exhibits in San Francisco.
Several librarians saw smarter search engines: George Porter of CalTech and Greg Schmitz both predicted third-generation tools oriented toward subject-searching, while John C. Kaminski saw "the eventual completion of Internet 2" as a help for access to scholarly resources. That's a tall order, but the I2 Web site does show methodical progress to our next-generation Internet.
Magic Eight Ball says: We'll learn to log off! Gerard Mittelstaedt of the McAllen (Tex.) Memorial Library peered into his Eight Ball and it said, "we will . . . smell the roses . . . hike the trails, sail our boats . . . and find the experience more rewarding than the reality glowing out at us from those little screens in front of our faces." (Just don't forget your sunscreen, insect repellent, and life vest.) Lou Rosenfeld predicted that "we'll stop writing and caring so much about the Internet, and will understand that the truly meaningful issues are information organization, access, and dissemination." Then Lou, who works for Argus Associates, a company involved in "information architecture for the Web," reconsidered; "Maybe by 2008," he said. See you in 10 years, Lou!
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