The Digital Librarian

A colleague recently said something that had me digging back through my presentation archive and I stumbled across something I hadn’t seen in years. It was a mockup of a piece of software that, for lack of imagination, I called the “Digital Librarian”. Now don’t hate on me for that.

I created it to depict a few things that I thought (at the time) would be essential features of a next-generation finding tool. First, it offered fully integrated access to books, journal articles, and the web. Second, it would privilege content that was either close to you (“local”) or selected (for web content). Third, it sought to highlight those items that were available. Fourth, it offered reasonable activities for each item based on its status (e.g., placing a hold on a checked out item). Fifth, it offered a way to initiate an online conversation with a librarian.

I created this mockup in 1999, as part of a piece I had written for American Libraries titled “Determining Our Digital Destiny.” It appeared in the January 2000 issue, and I subsequently used the mockup in talks I gave that year and for some time thereafter. In other words, it was basically a Summon or a WorldCat Local before there was such a thing.

Of course I was wrong about the virtual reference piece. As it turned out, no one seemed to want to have a video chat with a librarian. At least that part of my prediction has not come to pass. But if you substitute chat, then that part still works in the mockup.

Somehow I found this discovery gratifying. Not that I had at least somewhat predicted the future — because I didn’t, many people had the same or similar ideas before I did — but because it has come to pass. Sure, not as fully or as well as one can envision in a smoke-and-mirrors mockup, but well enough and getting better all the time.