More thoughts on my upcoming talk to the Librarians’ Association at UNC – Chapel Hill aka LAUNC-CH.

The upcoming challenges in collections will involve the increasingly digital nature of our lives. following on projects like Microsoft’s my life bits with Gordon Bell and the promise of curation of all kinds of digital personal repreesntations and artifacts of self from Google and Yahoo!, library collections will be faced with doing work that is substantially different than the kind of triage and brokering between publisher and reader.

Challenges will come not just in selection but in preservation and access across time as formats and rules for access change. One particularly tough problem for academic libraries will be to answer the requirement to
preserve datasets from various research groups for periods up to two decades. Think for a second, what data from 1986 can you access today? You see the problem immediately.

Location of collections will also be a challenge. Expect more artifacts to be found in professors’ offices or their computers or co-located on several networked locations.

[still thinking of course]