Today I went down to the BL for a workshop event imagining future library services for researchers using the BL.

“This Library 2020 project forms part of a British Library initiative which seeks to identify future information and research needs of users of BL onsite and remote services. The objective is to combine research that Ex-Libris has conducted on emerging technologies that can lead to the future development of research tools with input from BL users on how these could be used.”

We were shown a nice prezi with some prompts (mostly google youtube clips) on emerging/concept technologies including:

1. Digitization of all rthe things
2. Google translate (and similar) for seamless search and translation
3. Semanticising all the things and linked data
4. Analytics – as in the ability to run search style queries on data sets via search engines (rather than as in paradata and learning analytics)
5. Natural language querying and complex semantic searches (e.g. queries with multiple embedded information needs)
6. Personalisation e.g. like Google Now, tailoring results to interests, tailored augmented reality tools, etc.
7. Rich hypermedia embedding and remixing of materials including in tangibles
8. Flexible and wearable (inc. glasses) devices
9. Tone sensitive voice command & transcription, e.g. if I read a paper to a system can it extract the features that are salient to me from my intonation?

We had a lot of interesting discussions (which will be written up, so I’ll just link to that when it goes up) around a particular use-case. This is an important area for me given I want my research to be relevant (!) and to keep abreast of how people are thinking about these issues. Some of the things I mentioned included geo-and-topic-matching of alike researchers, use of diversity aware search to give researchers different perspectives and other researchers working on the same area but in different groups/disciplines, and use of library readership data to make suggestions for other relevant material.  Be interested to see how their planning pans out!