Letter to the Future

Dear all,

When you open this, you are opening a key to the past. My colleagues and I are writing to you from the year 2020. Believe it or not, our letter is collaborative, even though we all live miles away from each other. We each have an expertise and fill a niche for our community of learners.

We belong to a net of small community colleges. We are one of many.  Each school provides a specialized learning and much of this is achieved via the Internet. Each college has one day in each semester where a student needs to have some type of face-to-face communication either in person or with a visual recognition application.

Many of our students attend school as they did back in the first quarter of the 21^st century. The library, though, has changed along with education and how we all live here in 2020. First of all, we don’t have many print textbooks. In class, students use simulations for the sciences. These are 3D and the students post their lab discoveries on a wiki. They work in groups of 3-5 and each week there’s a different leader. At the end of an 8 week session, the groups report back to each other in a virtual world; that is, a school lab that mimics one in the physical world. In this way, students interact as a large group from all over.

The library, well, it’s almost the same. The librarians come from all over the world depending on their knowledge of expertise. We have one librarian who oversees the physical operations. Most of our resources are now online. The library operates in a virtual world. We use Google as our umbrella because it’s simple and clear to use. Google provides us with our journal articles, books, photos, and really, just about everything. The students come to the library for popular reading. I’m not sure what you all do way in the future. But we still have print for this type of reading. And, believe it or not, people still read magazines. Of course they find out about their favorite subjects through RSS fees.

And, when a student works on an assignment, they still contact us. We tell them the types of tags (they used to call this cataloging way back in 2008) that will attract information for their topic. It’s sort of like putting honey out for the bears or beer for the slugs (oops, no pun intended). We have this saying, if you build it they will come (this is from a really ancient movie “Field of Dreams”). Student don’t actively seek information because of these feeds. They just have it so easy.

 Anyway, back to my job as a librarian. I keep in touch with students though this service called Twitter. We have this core of students. As the students move on with their academics, they are assigned a different librarian. For now, I’m working with first year students. Boy, some of them think they know everything! Anyhow, these are theatre students and when they need help with their papers, finding books, locating the link for musical versus serious drama, I’m their person. By  the way, my moniker is Little Peep. That’s what I provide to my charges: a little peep of information, a clue and they must discover the rest.

In my area, the students still use blogs as this works better than wikis for them. Their blog projects involve interviews and writing. They send each other comments about the interviews. Right now they are working on an interactive book for children. It’s about life back in 2000.  Each student contributes a chapter and a picture or a photograph. There are a few resources with huge amounts of visual data from which they can draw. Some still use Flickr, others use Picasa (because it’s part of Google so it’s just more seamless for them). Some of the students wanted to put together this interactive video for kids, but I said to stick to the assignment. Anyhow, they keep making these crazy videos of each other so I can see them as whole beings, not just as students (guess who’s the student) or this 

We used to use what’s known as a bookmarking Internet site (good golly, what is the Internet in your time period). It was too confusing. Initially back in 2007 we all thought this was a great idea. But, some ideas come and go. This really needed more true old time cataloger’s skills like this.

 Ooops, this is not the right picture. Here’s who we catalogers aspire to: St. Minutiae, the patron saint of catalogers splitting a hair.

This next photo illustrates my point, you really have to be specific or it all becomes a jumble.

I can’t help myself; here’s one example of why tags need to be concise and easy to locate. The Collier Classification System for Very Small Objects.

I hope you can recognize the objects in this storage locker. For some reason, I felt it was important for you see the types of equipment and gadgets used in 2008. The box with all the small drawers is part of a card catalog. We used this system back in the mid to late 1900s. Each card had a typewritten decription of a book, journal, photograph, or map that included the title, author, size, pages, publisher, date of publication. Oh that was very time consuming. Now we use a samll handheld computer and have all sorts of integrated systems to help our work flow. The flat square and box below this is an old computer. This was the representation of information in the early 21^st century.

In 2020, it’s all on a small mobile device that can expand if we need a bigger visual space. That’s here too; it’s about 4 inches by 3 inches. Yep, back in 2020, we in the United States are still using inches, not metric. Oh, I do hope things have changed from the nasty chair-desk configuration. At least, outside of the physical classroom, there’s more comfort as we are in our homes. Oh, I saved the best for last. Here’s a photo of me.

It’s not very good, but at least you’ll have an idea of how librarians looked in 2020.