www.e-envoy.gov.uk

A vision of the future

Maewyn Cumming

Assistant Director, Interoperability

Office of the e-Envoy, Cabinet Office

Predicting the future is dangerous

• "640K ought to be enough for anybody."

• - Bill Gates, 1981.

Being wrong can become a habit…

• "Radio has no future.""X-rays are clearly a hoax.""The aeroplane is scientifically impossible."

• - Royal Society president William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, 1897-9.

Even the cleverest…..

• "There is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable. It would mean that the atom would have to be shattered at will."

• - Albert Einstein, 1932

Not only in technology…….

• "It will be years - not in my time - before a woman will become Prime Minister."

• - Margaret Thatcher, 1974

Be wrong for the right reasons!

• "Brain work will cause women to go bald."

• - Berlin professor, 1914

Future of what?

• Libraries and librarianship

• Government services to itself

• Government services to the public and businesses

Libraries: Images of the future

• Continuation

• Collapse

• Disciplined

• Transformation

1. Continuation

The Image of Continuation: 

• Libraries and library services continue to exist essentially as they currently are. 

Unlikely

• denies the impact of technology

• history shows we adapt

2. Collapse

The Image of Collapse:

The much predicted death of libraries:

A future in which libraries and library services cease to exist

The most dire of future images

 

3. Disciplined

The Disciplined Image:

• Libraries and library services become organized around traditional values, services and organizations…

– librarians as archivists

– libraries as places to preserve the culture

4. Transformation

The Image of Transformation

• libraries and library services evolve into something entirely new

• the most difficult future to imagine

Dependencies

• Changes in government

• Changes in technology

• Changes in the profession itself

• How we respond to these

Today, joining up is done by users

Citizens and businesses

Information and transaction services

Integration has to be part of the service

Information and transaction services

Integration

This can apply to internal customers

WWW

IntranetGSI

Knowledge

Network

Departmental Records

Shared files

Library

ELG

What’s wrong with this picture?

• ‘E-Government: A Practical Guide to the Legal Issues’, from Sweet & Maxwell

That sounds good. But where do I get it from??

The future

• We will become more customer focused

• Customers will know what we do!

• They will know its not all about books.

• They will know we are not like a public library

Our users

• They will do most of their information finding themselves

– they will get it wrong….

– …..or do it badly

– They will come to us for the hard stuff

– They won’t realise how much we have done

to get them as far as they went

What will we actually do?

• We will be more involved in the behind- the-scenes work that makes everyone’s lives easier

• More cataloguing!

• More consultancy

• More places and more systems

Transformed information systems

• Create the one stop information shop

• Portals will give access to libraries, records, documents. Websites and intranets will tie in.

• This will take some careful structuring and organising of information.

The transformed environment

WWW

Intranet

GSI

Knowledge

Network

Departmental Records

Shared files

Library

ELG

Search interface

The transformed profession

• Information organisers and managers, rather than finders

• Information will cease to be split by format or geography

• Users will do it themselves

– They will come to us for the hard stuff

– They won’t realise how much we have done

to help them find what they do find

More transformation

• We will get paid more!

– (This one might be

wishful thinking)

Our image won’t change

• Some things you just can’t fight.