A talk delivered by James Baker at the Anybook Oxford Libraries Conference 2015 - Adapting for the Future: Developing Our Professions and Services, 21st July 2015.

1. Library Users of
the Future…
Or, projecting outward from that fringe of
researchers we struggle to support today
Dr James Baker
Curator, Digital Research
@j_w_baker

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CRISPR

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Open up all the things!

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Automate all the things!

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Digitise all the things!

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Collect all the things!

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With regards to mechanical knowledge, it is probable that we are still
in our infancy, and when it is considered that, fifty years ago, many
inventions for abridging the operations of industry, which are now in
common use, were utterly unknown, it is not absurd to conjecture that
fifty years hence, some new contrivance may be thought of in
comparison with which the steam engine and spinning jennies,
however wonderful they appear to us at present, will be considered as
slight and insignificant discoveries.
Frederick Morton Eden, The State of the Poor, 3 vols. (1797)

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Research Library Users of the Future…
Will use research patterns not
yoked to print and playback

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Interfaces to these worlds must be designed to maintain an inherent
tension with the worlds outside the machine
Siegfried Zielinski, Deep Time of the Media (2006)

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Research Library Users of the Future…
Will be all about the born digital
(well, sort of)

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To do justice to the aspirations of a macroscope, and to use it to
perform the Humanities effectively – and politically – we need to be
able to contextualise every single word in a representation of every
word, ever. Every gesture contextualised in the collective record of all
gestures; and every brushstroke, in the collective knowledge of every
painting.
Tim Hitchcock, ‘Big Data, Small Data and Meaning’ (2015)
It’s not about making things, but trying to make a difference
Tim Sherratt, ‘Unremebering the Forgotten’, Digital Humanities 2015

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Research Library Users of the Future…
Will (still) need you to help them
get from A to B

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Research Library Users of the Future…
Will use research patterns not
yoked to print and playback
Will be all about the born digital
Will (still) need you to help them
get from A to B

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Research Library Users of the Future…
Will use research patterns not
yoked to print and playback
Will be all about the born digital
Will (still) need you to help them
get from A to B

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We fail to unyoke from print
(Or, unyoke too far)

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We fail to reassess risk
(Or, get in hot water)

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We fail to grow the 1%
(Or, alienate the 99%)

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Thank you!
@j_w_baker
james.baker@bl.uk
http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-scholarship/
Deck: http://www.slideshare.net/drjwbaker/