Digital Futures: Strategies for the Information Age

Citation

Steele, C. (2002), "Digital Futures: Strategies for the Information Age", Online Information Review, Vol. 26 No. 6, pp. 425-426. https://doi.org/10.1108/oir.2002.26.6.425.2

Marilyn Deegan and Simon Tanner have produced an extremely readable and comprehensive overview of digital futures. Deegan is currently Digital Resources Director at the Refugee Studies Centre at Oxford University and formerly Manager for Computing in the Arts. Simon Tanner is Senior Consultant for the Higher Education Digitisation Service at the University of Hertfordshire.

Their aim is to examine the strategic issues in digital futures for libraries and librarians within social, cultural and historic frameworks – i.e. not promoting technology for technology’s sake. They have realised that such a work cannot be comprehensive and that this is a rapidly evolving area, even, as noted later, to the extent that publication of this volume in print form may well be outdated.

Chapters include coverage of such topics as digitisation, funding and economic issues, metadata, portals and the role and nature of the hybrid library. The chapters are supplemented by a bibliography, glossary and index. The authors have assumed no technical knowledge on the part of the reader. This will assist many, as the authors bring clarity to such subjects as digital object identifiers and interoperability.

In a book that talks about technical and digital advances there is a real danger in lack of currency, and some phrases and sections have now been rendered out of date or redundant. For example, Questia is stated to be “the most potentially threatening to the role of libraries”, and we know what happened to Questia in 2001. They also state “NetLibrary is the ebook publisher that many feel has the most to offer libraries”, yet they had to be bailed out by OCLC, and many question their access model. There are several other examples that could be quoted – it might have been preferable for the authors to focus on the more generic issues.

The authors are particularly cogent in their descriptions of the digital world and the skills required by librarians to take their place in the twenty‐first century information arena. In this twenty‐first century arena one wonders whether their message is encapsulated in the wrong medium. For example, is a hardback print book the right format rather than an online version with appropriate online linkages? The authors cite many URLs in the text, which clearly cannot be clicked on for access. The capacity for online updating in an area of rapid technological change is essential. Given that this is such a useful book, perhaps it is now time for The Library Association to show its leadership as an information provider and move to electronic publication models.