Keywords
Citation
Knight, J. (2009), "Emerging Technologies for Academic Libraries in the Digital Age", Program: electronic library and information systems, Vol. 43 No. 2, pp. 233-234. https://doi.org/10.1108/00330330910954451
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2009, Emerald Group Publishing Limited
The world of computing and IT has one constant: change. New technologies are always appearing from research laboratories and companies. They vie for attention from users and implementers. Some of these developments bloom into widely used systems, international standards and the basis of even newer systems. Others appear, struggle for acceptance and then slowly wink into oblivion.
This constant churning of what's “hot” and what's not is something the academic librarians, managers and systems folk increasingly have to consider on a day‐to‐day basis. This book is intended to provide the reader with pointers to fields in which technologies of interest to libraries and library users are likely to appear.
The book is roughly divided into four parts. The first part attempts to define emerging and cutting‐edge technologies and looks at the new functions and missions that academic libraries will be taking on in the future. This is intended to set the scene and context for the remainder of the book. The difference between “emerging” and “cutting‐edge” technologies is one that the author tries to define clearly. Emerging technologies are the very latest ideas that are still being actively developed and are not yet really ready for production use. They are what might be termed “the bleeding edge” of technological development. Cutting‐edge technologies on the other hand actually have products on the shelves – they are new but they are also potentially things that a library might want to start making use of immediately. Really it is the former, emerging technologies that the book is looking at, but emerging technologies have a nasty habit of turning into cutting‐edge technologies. The distinction between the two is often not clear and in some ways is in the eye of the beholder.
The second part of the book investigates the various fields that emerging technologies may hail from, and where they may lead the academic library. Naturally many of these fields are computing, communications and information based, but there are some fields that many librarians might not currently think of as sources of library technologies such as nanotechnology and artificial intelligence. Part 3 contains four chapters that examine how the emerging technologies may affect and influence different aspects of the academic library. These include management decision making, how library information systems will need to function in the future, the changes they may make on services provided by a library and the impact on librarians themselves. Finally, the fourth part of the book looks to the future and the changes it will bring. It provides some suggestions as to how academic libraries can make the most of their information services in what is likely to be an unpredictable technological world where many disruptive forces are vying with one another for attention.
Each chapter in the book follows a consistent formula: there is an introductory section, then the “guts” of the chapter, followed by some examples, a summary, exercises, case studies and references. This indicates quite clearly one of the major markets that this book is aimed at: library schools and their students. Whilst it claims to also be targeting administrators, library managers, IT staff and librarians, these appear to be very much a second focus. Indeed these people are already likely to be dealing with the onslaught of emerging and cutting‐edge technologies already, so this book is mostly telling them things that they will already know.
There are also two appendices and a glossary. The first appendix lists some core resources on emerging technologies and best practice in dealing with them that readers may find useful, including conferences, trade shows, printed materials and web resources. The second appendix is rather odd: it lists 100 “famous” universities and their libraries, based on the author's own opinion and his own, rather debatable (his words, not mine!) criteria. It is not really clear what the purpose of this is or how the book's readers are supposed to make use of it. It rather feels like a tacked on “page filler” that does not provide much more information than a decent bit of searching on Google would provide. The glossary on the other hand seems much better – it has 30 pages of clear explanations of many of the terms that are currently “hot” in the IT field that library staff and students may find useful. The book is rounded off with a perfectly adequate eight page index.
The author has set himself a difficult topic for this book, especially as he tries to provide real world examples, case studies and exercises, because emerging technologies by their very nature are nebulous things that can be difficult to pin down. Indeed some might well argue that several of the emerging technologies in the book are no longer emerging by the definitions given: they now have commercial products available, user groups and track records, which makes them look suspiciously like they have morphed into cutting‐edge technologies. That of course might have been intentional: if the main target audience are students and their teachers, this disagreement could be viewed as a way of stimulating debate and self‐discovery. For those readers this is probably a useful text book to have available, but for other library professionals there are likely to be other, more pressing texts competing for their reading time.