WEEK 3 - CONTINUED - OH, THE PLACES WE COULD GO!

Well, it's been a bit of a merry-go-round for me these last couple of weeks, well, more like the merry-go-round at the end of Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train. Could Farley Granger be any creepier? So, a whack load of interesting reading which I am to boil down to what vision I would have of my community and public library 10 years hence. This is more challenging than I think Anne Marie expected for me. 

Why? Because I've been through a library Master's programme with one professor shouting: "Books are doomed! Doomed! Why are you people even bothering with them! In 5 years, we'll all be using PCs to read what we need! It will all be on there!" That was in the 1983. I figure by now this same professor is in a white robe wearing a sandwich board, ringing a bell on the corner of Richmond and Dundas in London (Ontario) and still shouting the same. Go get 'em, Frank!

I also laughed hysterically when I watched Things to Come, the mid-30s film adaptation of H.G. Wells's novel, or basically any sci-fi flicks from the 50s. Even Star Wars is a hoot. Ah, Duck Dodgers in the 241/2 century!

No, no. The future takes so many twists as more and more, technological progress is telescoping the time to move from one platform to another. Look at the gaps between the 1940 station at Bletchey, England to the first IBM main frame business computer to the PC to the laptop to the portable phone to the tablet to the... clouds, I see clouds... or the Berliner phonograph to the 33 rpm to the, oops sidetrack to 8 track, to the cassette to the DVD to the mp3 player to the... clouds, I see clouds... So, many things could go either way. 

BUT, being optimistic, believing that by 2012 we haven't nuked each other into smithereens, wingnuts from any religious side haven't won out over any other, the archeologists have discovered that a set of hieroglyphs on the Mayan calendar actually reads as: "Need a refill for this calendar? Contact Xiochitottl today!" and the earth's poles haven't flipped, amongst oh, so many other delights, I was able to come up with something I was happy with (other than the fact that, oh, please God, I'll be retired!) for my community.

10 YEAR VISION

For the Community:

The community has lost its original francophone bias through increased relocation of commuters, predominantly anglophone. I gave it 5 years at my job interview but it's already happening: anglophone service reps in stores, gas stations who can't speak a word of French. And the Catholic school board has lost its grip on much of the community, freeing it up to expand in a more multicultural way. Heck, we might all simply be part of the mega-city OttaKings. 

The rate of unemployment is pretty much the same. There are far more nasty people but then again there are far more nicer people so crime rate is fairly the same except crimes are uglier because weapons as well have improved which is a boon for news sights clamouring for eyes to boost their statistics and bragging rights. 

writng hs evlvd cuz chat qukr, mre pplar bt f10 mzred, cozn cnfusn. Unfortunately, due to massive use of social media, predominantly text based, younger people have lost the ability to recognize or create many facial and body cues, seeing older people who actually smile and touch as being creepy because they do so rather than flash an emoticon or send a poke. Wait, that's happening now!

I could go on as I've been through the 70s (who could see that polyester nightmare coming!) and the selfish 80s (brought to you by the very flower children of the 1960s!) and the downsizing 90s not to mention 2001 living in a border town with the U.S.

So, mine is not so much a filmstrip, more a film festival with some stuff ranging from Disney-esque to Peckinpaw-Tarantino love child. And it's all just that, what a wise monk once replied when people asked him for his response to a horrible event: "We will see."

For the Library:

Print material is still abundant. Electronic access has expanded as it is practical and cheap.  But like fast food restaurants, people know it for what it is.

The Library exists as a community hub. City council understands that it is the distribution centre for information and has relocated many of its services as have the federal and provincial governments. But you don't want to know how bad it had to get before the bureaucrats finally admitted that, for information distribution, libraries do it best.

The Library is space, a physical space to allow the community a common place to share and be and an electronic space (think educational commons gone municipal meets community cloud) where as a portal, information is accessed and deposited.

Staff is occupied matching people to services and matching people to other people (reading clubs, teens teaching seniors / seniors teaching teens), observing, documenting and analyzing community needs to inform the various governments of rising trends and needs in that community (as oppose to whacked out attempts at the governments to bring in services that are "cool" but not currently needed or wanted or helpful). 

Staff coordinates and facilitates the venues for people to physically meet (storytimes, literacy, tutoring, group events) and the access to collected and pooled knowledge (indexing information stored in the community cloud and databases for better access). Yes, there are bibliometric tools, specialized software to crunch through the massive amounts of data but staff is still needed to, borrowing an old term from my grad studies, massage the data to maintain its usability.

Then again, by 2022, we could all be slaves to a more technologically advanced civilization from somewhere in the universe who came to us in peace and discovery. For further insights into this vision, see the history of Africa, Latin America, India, the Middle East, most of southern Asia...