CIL Opening Keynote

The opening keynote for CIL was Clifford Lynch who provided an interesting retrospective of computer in libraries and a brief look at trends for the future. Some trends in discussed included:

• Move from Scarcity to Abundance
• Moving from a world of surrogates for physical things to digital representations that stand on by themselves
• Move from capabilities in the hands of large institutions to capabilities in the hands of individuals
• Moving at last into an age of broader authorship?
• Move Towards more structured data
• Much great interest in questions about preservation and digital obsolence
• Issues of personal history and personal trails and their persistence

Of all of these the last interests me the most. I find it fascinating what some of the students who work for us are willing to put on the web about themselves and others. I ask them if they realize that they are creating a digital history of themselves that may not be eraseable. They don’t seem to be too concerned with this now. However, I often wonder how they will feel when they go looking for a job. Certainly, having a blog this issue is one of concern for me. I’m pretty careful about what I post to my blog. I also know that when I go job hunting I should Google my name and see what comes up. If I can find it so can my prospective employers. Telling the students that work for us to “Google” themselves and see what comes up has made an impression on a couple. At least one discovered something that made her confortable that it was out there for all to see. The bottom line is this is an issue that society has not truly considered all the ramification of and we will be seeing the backlash sometime down the road sooner rather than later.