Libraries of the Future

by J.C.R. Licklider

First edition. Discusses the possible use of computers in libraries. Interesting reading. Jacket rubbed and price clipped. xvii, 219 pages. cloth, dust jacket.. 8vo..

Genres: Computers

219 pages, Hardcover

First published March 15, 1965

Reviews

[Suzan Alteri · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although Licklider's book was written over 40 years ago, it still rings true today. While his idea that the library will become a computer has not come true, his imagining of information retreival and user interfaces still has importance for any librarian, particularly academic librarians today. A must-read for anyone in the profession.

[Tatjana · Rating 5 out of 5]

Phenomenal.
This book is written more for computer scientists and less for librarians. This book logically designs the path towards what would become distributed computing and data-driven information management. If you aren't enamored with the beauty of the maths that get you there, you won't enjoy it. This is not the snappy, sixth grade level, journalistic-style writing our culture has become accustomed to in non-fiction. This book expects you to gird your loins and pay attention, because he never dumbs it down. Nope. Not once.

So if hard science fiction is your thing and you can visualize what math and science is trying to describe, you will love this book like I did. If you like snappy writing and want yet another book telling you how awesome libraries will be in the future, go find something else to read.

[Peter Aronson · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting but odd little book. If you were tasked with anticipating the library or information processing system of the future, would you assemble a "small group of engineers and psychologists"? With no library scientists, philosophers specializing in the theory of knowledge, other type of social scientists or historians or scholars of the humanities? Of course it was the 60's when the fetishization of engineering was at one of its periodic heights, and it was Bolt, Beranek and Newman who were hired to do the study, and they did consult specialists. But still.

Some people claim that this study predicted the modern hyperlinked, searchable internet. There is some truth to that, but I would say it more predicted modern full text search engines (of course, there is some overlap there). Of course, it didn't really tell how to build them, but rather how they would appear to the user.

What's particularly interesting is what Linklider and his team anticipated but hasn't shown up yet, such as semantic analysis of documents as opposed to syntactical analysis. We are just getting to that now, using approaches not even anticipated in the 60's such as big data and machine learning (although, will such approaches actually understand the semantics of natural language-- and just what do we mean by "understand", anyways?).

Another interesting difference from anticipation and reality is the democratization of the internet. Linklider saw the "library of the future" as a tool for experts, curated for experts. I wonder what he would think of the wild west it has become?