A Brief History of the Future of Libraries: An Annotated Bibliography (review)

If you are like most folk, even librarians, you likely think that reading annotated bibliographies is worse than enduring a prison sentence. But this work may change your mind. The author, a career academic librarian and currently head of access services at the University of Miami Library, has assembled more than 650 citations that pertain to predictions about the future of libraries that appeared between 1978 and 1999, inclusively. He systematically distills their essence, summarizes their forecasts, and makes sense of the trends they reveal regarding the profession's infatuation with technology.

Challenged in graduate school by reading F. W. Lancaster's Toward Paperless Information Systems (Academic Press, 1978), the author began to note the reactions to the volume from the "traditionalists" and the "technologists" as they predicted their own alternative outcomes for the future. The challenge of this project, suggested by a colleague, was to assemble an exhaustive bibliography of articles and books seeking to forecast what libraries would be like in the twenty-first century so that "when we get there, we can go back and read them, and see how wrong we were" (vii). This is, however, not the explicit objective of this book; rather, the survey provides a perspective for the ongoing discussion of the role of technological change and libraries.

Each included item cites the Lancaster work or one that cites it. Items appearing here represent the comprehensive core that remained after the author examined more than two thousand works identified in the professional literature of library and information science. A listing of included authors reads like a veritable who's who of writing leaders of the profession. Very few library leaders and information technology authorities could apparently resist the temptation to prognosticate about the library's future in some way, some almost gleefully predicting its demise while others stalwartly asserting its enduring characteristics.

The book begins with a lengthy introduction that summarizes the earlier lit-erature from 1876 to 1900, 1900 to 1945, and 1956 to 1977. This thirty-five-page review provides the foundation for the study of later predictions and includes some ninety-five references. However, the bulk of the work divides into four chronological chapters: chapter 1, "Tradition Confronts Technology: 1978-1984" with 112 entries; chapter 2, "New Directions and the Beginnings of Change, 1985-1989" with 123 entries; chapter 3, "Electronic Libraries and New Paradigms, 1990-1994" with 230 entries; and chapter 4, "The Future Arrives, 1995-1999" with 199 entries. The 664 entries are each accompanied by a carefully written abstract of about a hundred words that outlines the main predictive elements from the item, but equally or even more useful are the insightful analytical essays of ten pages or so that identify and summarize the trends for the period as revealed by the author's examination of the cited items. The abstracts and particularly the essays provide a helpful survey of the notions that were prevalent in their time periods. The index lists the entries under nearly one hundred subject headings that tie the predictions together in a linear fashion. This work of reviewing trends will be especially appreciated by doctoral students and young scholars of modern information history as well as more reflective practitioners who have worked during the past quarter century.

In his "Final Reflections on the Paperless Society" (211-21), the author, having begun with Lancaster the predictor of 1978, turns to Lancaster the sage and his 1999 Library Journal essay, "Second Thoughts on the Paperless Society," in which he expresses his disillusionment with the alleged panacea of technology: "In particular, too many librarians have become intoxicated by the power and abundance of technology. The result is that the profession is becoming uncritical, dehumanized, and worse of all either ignorant of or indifferent to user needs." The evidence that Sapp provides indicates that...