Libraries of the Future

Exploring the scenario spaces

The second “academic libraries of the future” workshop was held in Aston on 23 March. Brian Collins (Chief Scientific Advisor for BIS and DfT) started the day by exploring the future technological landscape for Higher Education, discussing topics such as the semantic web, cloud computing and 3D.

Then the hard work for attendees really began! In group sessions we explored possible scenario axes and candidate scenario spaces. Attendees once again came from across the HE sector - senior institutional management, librarians, subject specialists, publishers and service providers. We also were delighted to welcome international attendees from America, Germany and the Netherlands.

Attendees firstly explored the impact and uncertainty of 8 key questions for HE in 2050 (the output of the first workshop). The aim was to identify those questions where there was much uncertainty about what the answer would be, and those where the answer would have a high impact for the way HE was delivered. We used the standard impact-uncertainty matrix to help us sort the key questions (see picture).

Three high impact, high uncertainty questions were identified by attendees as the scenario axes:

• Are content, research, technology, media open or closed?
• Is the emphasis on quantity or quality of students for UK HE?
• Is the emphasis on market or state mechanisms for funding and regulation of research in the UK?

These three axes generate 8 scenario spaces for UK HE in 2050 (eg open|quantity|market) which were explored by attendees to eliminate those that were implausible and give the rest names – a good way of getting into the essence of a scenario space. Scenario names included “Tribal factories”, “Gucci HE” and “Survival of the fittest”. The groups then chose one scenario to develop in more detail – What does this world look like? How is UK HE delivered? How did we get here?

The day finished with Gill Ringland giving a closing keynote on “how scenarios are used”. Gill described how scenarios deal with uncertainty and change and how they can be used linked to strategy (identifying early indicators, anticipating change, identifying “go do it” actions).

What progress have we made?

The project formally started in September 2009; the diagram below outlines our current progress. For more information about our overall approach, see here.

Next steps

The next task for our project team is to decide on 3-4 scenarios to take forward from the 8 scenario spaces identified at the workshop. They must be internally consistent and interesting for libraries. They are not predictive (so we will not be choosing those we think are most likely), and will not all be “positive” scenarios. We will publish the 3-4 outline scenarios in May 2010.

The project team will then focus on planning and organising a series of small workshops involving subject specialists (eg on IPR, buildings, archiving) to take place in Summer 2010. These workshops will help develop the detail of the scenarios for libraries – what are the information requirements in these worlds and how will information services be delivered?

We will also be running an interactive session at the SCONUL Conference 2010 in June.

If you are interested in finding out about other current futures projects being undertaken by our partner SAMI Consulting (and other interesting news items), sign up to receive their monthly eSAMI newsletter.