Chapter 14: Current and Future Services
Television did not kill radio broadcasting, cable did not eliminate broadcasting, cellular phones have not replaced wall units, and interactive information services will not destroy existing media.
Archives: Expert Predictions
Wherein the Author Considers the Future of the Library, the Myth of Free Information, and a Novel Way to Heat Bathwater
The dream of a universal fountain of information, free for all comers, will ever remain that: a dream. If this were simply an illusion, I’d shrug. But the rush to computerize libraries has several nasty side effects.
Wherein the Author Considers the Future of the Library, the Myth of Free Information, and a Novel Way to Heat Bathwater
People are lazy. Ease of use is more important than content. Put something online – anything – and researchers will love it, whether or not it’s right. This is a driving force behind the move for online libraries and indeed the Internet itself.
Street Corners in Cyberspace
Speech in cyberspace will not be free if we allow big business to control every square inch of the Net. The public needs a place of its own.
Miss Manners’ Guide to Excruiatingly Correct Internet Behavior
I have this hope that [the Internet] is going to revive the arts of conversation and letter-writing. Because suddenly people who used the phone only to communicate are writing out their thoughts and feelings.
2.9 Public Access to Government Information
The National Information Infrastructure will make it much simpler for U.S. citizens to gain access to information they have already paid for.
2.6 Education and Training
The National Information Infrastructure will make available a wide variety of simulation-based education and training services that can be accessed through home or industry telecommunication systems. These simulation-based training systems will be tailored to a specific domain and will allow a student to live in that domain.
2.5 Advanced Manufacturing
Companies will be able to band together to jointly manufacture goods. This will require rapid tailoring and composition of shared information services such as inventory control, work scheduling, and product delivery.
2.4 Crisis Management
Rapidly assembled response teams, consisting of Federal, state, and volunteer organizations, will be able to share and update electronic plans, collaborate during the execution of the plan, and use that plan as a basis for real-time training. Crisis planners would also be able to “collaborate through time” by comparing planned actions with historically relevant plans and through advanced simulation services.
2.3 Digital Libraries
To explore the full benefits of … digital libraries, the challenge for research and development is not merely how to connect everyone and everything together in the network. Rather, it is to achieve economically feasible technologies with which to digitize massive corpora of existing and new information from heterogeneous and distributed sources; then store, search, process and retrieve the information in a user-friendly way.