February 11, 2009

Sixteen books about the future of academic libraries

And how come none of them have librar* in the title?

Here's a bunch of books I've read (or will be reading) to help me figure out what's going on.

  1. Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies by charlene Li & Josh Bernoff

  2. The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet by Daniel J. Solove

  3. Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations by Clay Shirky

  4. Ambient Findability: What We Find Changes Who We Become by Peter Morville

  5. Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-by-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart by Ian Ayres

  6. The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, The Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next by Lee Smolin

  7. Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder by David Weinberger

  8. Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future by Cory Doctorow

  9. Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy by Lawrence Lessig

  10. The Future of the Internet--And How to Stop It by Jonathan Zittrain

  11. The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom by Yochai Benkler

  12. Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives by John Palfrey and Urs Gasser

  13. The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind by James Boyle

  14. Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns by Clayton Christensen, Curtis W. Johnson, and Michael B. Horn

  15. True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society by Farhad Manjoo

  16. Digitize This Book!: The Politics of New Media, or Why We Need Open Access Now by Gary Hall

It could just as easily been twenty or thirty. They're also evenly split between books I've already read and ones that I feel I need to read. The books I haven't read would constitute an entry in the "Books I'd Like to Read" category. (The Doctorow book I've read but not reviewed yet.) As usual, if you know of any books out there that I should read but haven't listed, feel free to let me know in the comments.

And what's up with me choosing teh ye olde paeper bookes for looking into the future anyway -- shouldn't I have chosen blogs, wikis, podcasts, video and ejournals and the like? Go on, set me straight. What should I be reading?

(Next up, I think I'll see if I can round up a list of relatively recent reports and white papers that look interesting. Yes, I'm obsessed, so shoot me.)

2 comments:

Coral said...

Weinberger's book is the best non-fiction I've read all year.

The Future of the Internet is also pretty good, though not intended to be about libraries, per se.

I'll have to look into some of these others. Thanks for posting them!

Anonymous said...

you've probably seen this arl report: http://www.arl.org/bm~doc/transformational-times.pdf
stephen abram does a good job of posting white papers/reports/etc. like this...