Enabling Technology and Information
Pat Gunn, guest blogger here. Today, I’d like to talk about enabling technology, information, and how they apply to libraries. It is said that Ptolemy decreed that all visitors to Alexandria were to loan any scrolls they might be carrying to the Library of Alexandria for copying. Before the invention of movable type, working with and duplication of text was a relatively time-consuming task which largely fell to the profession of scribe. In modern times, with literacy common in many parts of the world, this profession has disappeared (apart from some specialised religious purposes). Movable type shifted the economics and culture of reading and text production, acting as an enabling technology for increased literacy and widespread education. Printers and computers for the home likewise made information more fluid, providing a gateway between recently normal forms of information storage (typewriting or handwriting on paper) and the electronic forms that early adopters use (disks, CDROMs, etc). We are presently in a period of adaptation to a digital era — the traditional publishing industry is beginning to see competition from wholly electronic books while efforts to make better screens for reading continue. While the physical nature of information is shifting, the way it is produced and managed has also proven possible to change, with collaborative editing both on the small and large scale. Each of these changes places literacy and involvement with the information one is using closer to everyone’s hands. With the recent abundance of information, organising information and providing ways to access it, along with summarising and providing meaning to large amounts of information, abstract charters of librarianship and history, will be more important than today and will be realised in ways that will probably be unrecognisable to thos of either field today. Challenges facing us in the near future include information ownership (legal/philosophical/economic), universal/powerful/easy annotation capability (technological/standards), translations to other forms of media (we need better OCR, among other technology), and universal internet access (a social/economic/political issue).
