Introduction

Throughout this book we have examined the strategic issues in realizing a digital future for libraries and librarians, and in order to do so have so far taken a logical path from the creation and collection of digital content through to its delivery and management for the long term. We now look at what is on the near horizon for libraries and librarians.

As we suggested in Chapter 1 ‘Digital futures in current contexts’, trying to see the future in the realm of technology is likely to lead to some risibly erroneous predictions, but unless the future can be imagined, it cannot be brought about. As Einstein famously said ‘Imagination is more important than knowledge, for knowledge is limited while imagination embraces the entire world’. All inventions and developments begin with the question ‘What if the world were different?’ and from answering that question comes the march of human progress. The examples we cite at the beginning of Chapter 1 were famously proved to be wrong, though at the time they probably seemed to be reasonable statements. Predicting the future is a hit-and-miss affair: who could have conceived how very accurate Vannevar Bush and his contemporaries would be in describing that which we now know as the world wide web? Ted Nelson's description of his Xanadu project (also referred to in Chapter 1), linking all the books in all the world, seemed incredible in the 1970s, but those of us in the digital library field are now working hard to make it a reality. Writing a conventional book on digital technologies has made us realize just how fast the future is racing towards us: over the time we have been writing, many revisions and updates have been necessary to statements made just weeks before.