[zmzcqtef] Libraries of the future

I see libraries of the future as great storehouses of the world's information, much like the libraries of yesteryear and today.

With much information digital and digitized, libraries will have within them large data centers, storing immense quantities of digital information.  Libraries will be electronically connected peer-to-peer (in the same philosophy as "interlibrary loan") to other libraries and to their local community.

Libraries today store and share copyrighted works; so should libraries of tomorrow.

One portion of a library's data store should serve as a temporary cache for what the local patrons of the library access.  This will allow future patrons to rapidly access the data again.  The other portion is a "permanent collection" managed by librarians, who qualitatively identify what is worth not disappearing if an item were to disappear from all other caches of the peer to peer network: perhaps items of local significance.  In this way, libraries and librarians continue to serve as a means for preservation of information.  A librarian may go as far as creating tape, paper, and other physical backups of important information.

Another mode of use for a physical library is to prefetch data for the patron.  A patron comes in with a research request, perhaps an item of data which will take a long time to gather, perhaps because of its size or because currently the only copy resides in a distant, low bandwidth, portion of the network.  The library's servers patiently gather the data, obviating the need for the patron to run a personal server 24x7.  When the data is complete, the patron can come in and either do research on-site (perhaps complicated analyses of the data which are only convenient if the entire data set is available on local disk), or the patron can bring in a external hard drive to permanently "check out" the data.

Of course, for many small items of data, patrons can also access the library, in fact all libraries, on-line, by simply participating in the same peer to peer network as the library.  Of course, a patron will likely experience higher bandwidth to the local library.  By participating in peer-to-peer, the patron can also contribute to the world's storehouse of information, hopefully to be catalogued and permanently stored in this library network even if the patron's original computer should go away.

Librarians will serve an important role in libraries of tomorrow, in addition to maintaining the data center and selecting the permanent collection, already mentioned.  A patron comes in with a desire for information; the librarian helps formulate this into a query of the peer to peer network as well as post process (e.g., filter, convert format, MapReduce) the result to the answer the patron was seeking. 

Librarians will also spend a lot of time cataloguing, especially sorting out the crap and spam from not-crap, by tagging and cryptographically signing tags with meta information.  This meta information can be used to help formulate queries in the future.  In a digital information age where you never know whom to trust, your local librarian, perhaps who is paid by you by community taxes, serves as a trustable, human, agent.

Of course, we'll need to see some changes in law. We are on the cusp about whether this era will be the best recorded era in history or the worst recorded (another Dark Ages), and it all depends on the greediness of our big entertainment companies.