I’ve been describing 2018 as “hectic but good”. I made progress on my Masters. I did good work at my job. I travelled.

2019 looks like it will be an interesting year. The first month isn’t even over and there’s a lot happening at work, and I’m hoping to do my 3 week work placement for uni at Kelvin Hall in Scotland.

Kelvin Hall interests me because it’s an all-digital branch of the National Library of Scotland. I want to see how this all works: what’s available, how is it presented, and how does it meet the needs of its community?

I have been thinking about the future, recently.

If I’m going to spend the next 25 years of my working life in libraries, I need to think not just how libraries will change in that time, but how the world will too.

I don’t have a coherent vision yet. So here’s a grab-bag of links:

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned we have only 12 years to limit climate change catastrophe.

A People’s Guide to AI is designed to explain AI for a general audience: what can it do, what can’t it do, and what the likely effects on society.

The ‘Future Book’ Is Here, but It’s Not What We Expected by Craig Mod explores the way we get futurism wrong by looking at the grand predictions of the electronic, interactive Future Book, and what has actually happened:

Yet here’s the surprise: We were looking for the Future Book in the wrong place. It’s not the form, necessarily, that needed to evolve […] Instead, technology changed everything that enables a book, fomenting a quiet revolution. Funding, printing, fulfillment, community-building—everything leading up to and supporting a book has shifted meaningfully, even if the containers haven’t.

Finally, some reflections from Lisa Dempster after she moved from running the Melbourne Writers Festival to working for a public library: What I learned in a year of working for a public library.