BOBCATSSS 2009 opened in Porto today.
Tom Wilson’s key-note speech was called Thinking about the future.
The past is a foreign country (citing Hartley) – and so is the future.
The longer we live, the more foreign is the country. They do things differently there …
Tom has just carried out a Delphi investigation with Swedish colleagues on the kinds of research that will be of value to practitioners in the near future. The main needs – in their view – were studies on
- factors affect strategic development
- changing roles of libraries in communities
- children and libraries
- promotion of reading and literature
- the effectiveness and impact of library work
- developments in scholarly communication
- the library as a creative space
- new digital media in scholarship and research
- libraries, learning and education: stidying the impact of library and information services
- did not catch that one …
He quoted Bill Clinton:
When I took office, only physicists had heard about the World Wide Web. Now even my cat has its own page.
Bill Clinton (1993-2001)
Clinton should have said: only physicists and Norwegian librarians. The working librarians that participated in our Info 10 training course (1992-1994) were introduced to the Web in the spring 1993 …
Tom founded and still edits the peer-reviewed journal Information research. He started the blog Information research – ideas and debate in September 2007.
APPENDIX
Blog posts on the Delphi study:
[...] BOBCATSSS opens in Porto [...]
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