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After having read the 1980 Library Trends article, how clairvoyant do you think the author was in registering trends they saw as impacting the future of libraries? What did she get right? Wrong? Do you envision the Agosto and ACRL articles as accurate in their assessment of where libraries are headed or do you think they are getting something wrong? If so, what? Why? Please write a short paragraph response and respond to at least one colleague's post.

During the past decade, interest in teaching patrons about the facilities, services, use, and collections of academic libraries has reblossomed and flourished. Commitment to the importance of and necessity for instruction in library use and in research strategy became widespread and accepted. And, as the ranks of library instruction advocates grew, so also did the need for centralizing data and collecting materials. Practitioners could not individually keep up with the burgeoning activity, and were concerned about duplication of effort and material (Kirkendall, p. 29).

There is nothing in this paragraph that would prevent it from having been written in 2017 instead of early 1980. In thirty-seven intervening years, the same basic concerns are still in evidence. Change the names of the technologies mentioned in the article to their 2017 equivalents and you won’t feel like much has changed. She talks about the trends of the 70s – conducted tours are less popular, orientation programs that are burdened with too much tech are expensive to maintain, “bibliographies and simple lists of sources are not being produced on such a widespread basis”, instruction periods are getting shorter, experimental (i.e., innovative) instruction samples are less requested, library instruction is more informed by “input from the academic community” than before, computer-assisted instruction interest is expanding, credit courses in library skills are common, self-paced workbooks are in widespread use, “unified systems of library graphics” is widely recommended, pre-tests are used to measure skills and attitudes, “database searching is rapidly expanding”, and “subject-related library instruction is growing” (Kirkendall, p. 31).

Of the items in this list, I think the only trend to be significantly reversed is the production of bibliographies and simple lists of sources – LibGuides and wikis have proliferated rapidly in the last 10 years.

Additionally, she points to areas where improvement in current practice was needed:

We need to hear the reasons for failure of programs. We need a more standardized tool for measuring library use competence. Instruction programs are more often than not ethereal, and work needs to be done to embed the library skills unit, so essential for today’s researcher, in more courses in higher education. Instruction practitioners must be assiduous in collecting and recording statistics, for keeping track of the particulars of project use is invaluable in judging the degree of impact and usefulness of activity (Kirkendall, p. 34).

and

We also need more library school curricula which include teaching about instruction in library use, as schools are not equipping graduates with the knowledge and skills to complete for the orientation/instruction positions available today. Today's students need more than the expertise to explain the complexities of the card catalog; they need, Boisse asserts, “an understanding of the philosophical base for bibliographic instruction, a knowledge of the various approaches to the task, experience in designing a program through the delineation of clear, precise goals and objectives…. [and] instruction in designing and producing materials which will assist them in implementing a program (Kirkendall, p. 34)

What these two sections point to are: 1) the need for Big Data metrics to assess and provide better guidance for program design, implementation, and practice; 2) teaching research skills to students (future instructional librarians) needs to go beyond mere use-practice and push students into deeper understanding of the philosophical, methodological, and creation of better instructional materials.

Finally, she makes one very strong prediction:

Although it is presumptuous to propose a method of program implementation for every situation, since local circumstances determine the nature and content of any instruction activity, the needs of the library users will ultimately decide the future of the program itself [emphasis mine] (Kirkendall, p. 36).

This should be the prevailing guiding principle for all institutions that offer library school instruction. Teach your students what their students will need.

Do you envision the Agosto and ACRL articles as accurate in their assessment of where libraries are headed or do you think they are getting something wrong? If so, what? Why?

In general, I think the assessments made by Agosto and ACRL are sound and generally reflect the conventional wisdom accurately.

Agosto identifies 6 trends affecting public library service for teens:

Focus on what library does over what the library has Emphasis on information and information services in digital forms and formats Strong focus on library as place Broadening literacy and learning goals beyond reading Stepped-up teen involvement in service design and delivery Increased outreach and collaboration with non-library agencies. These seem credible trends for the next five years.

ACRL identifies the following trends/practice recommendations affecting academic librarianship:

Research data service offerings, digital scholarship centers, collection assessment trends, ILS and content provider/fulfillment mergers, evidence of learning: student success, learning analytics, credentialing, new directions with the Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education, altmetrics, emerging staff positions, Open Education Resources (OER). What seems to be a common theme among all these topics was the disruption of existing practice by new technologies, economic changes to academic publishing, and “social justice” critiques of existing practice. With the accelerating creation, adoption, and deployment of Big Data tools for analysis, artificial intelligence applications, affective computing interfaces for analytics, consolidation of publishers into fewer providers, and the ideological ascendance of partisan approaches to scholarship, there is a level of volatility that would challenge the most practiced futurist to predict what is going to emerge from this mixture. But it does seem to me that the ACRL committee has identified significant trends.

One factor that is missing in both Agosto and the ACRL article is the rapid improvement in A.I. This area of computing I think will be ultimately more disruptive than the last disruptive wave that followed the widespread adoption of the World Wide Web. This difference with this wave will be the ability of machines to learn and adapt from the BIG Data we are feeding them. Content Analysis and bibliometrics will be transformed; the use of emotion-sensing computer will change interview, observation, and focus group research; action research classroom research, and teaching will be altered with the introduction of assistive natural language processing question answering systems like IBM Watson (or an Academic Version of Alexa, Siri, Cortana, or Google) and automated monitoring technologies that can record and help researchers interpret data that were nearly “invisible” a few years ago without lots of time and effort.

Just like the Internet, some predictions will be spot on and others will be the equivalent of the failed dot.coms that are littered throughout the world like the bones of extinct species.

But regardless of where technology, social norms, and economic configurations take us, I think I would echo the words of Kirkendall - the needs of the library users will ultimately decide the future of the program itself.

Of course, that may mean some library users of the future may be robots, an electronic intelligence, or hybrid entities yet to manifest.

Welcome to the Brave New World, Future Librarians!