Are We Making the Most of Digital Forms of Scholarly Communication? | Katina Magazine

"In his essay “A Library for 2000 AD,” published in the 1962 collection Computers and the World of the Future, the Hungarian-born computer scientist John G. Kemeny, who would become president of Dartmouth College, argued that university libraries were turning obsolete and would basically be useless by the end of the century (Kemeny, 1968). The main issue was that libraries organized the storage and retrieval of scholarly information based on the physicality of the carriers of that information, which had become not only inefficient but actually untenable. He therefore proposed a radical reorganization that heavily relied on automation, storing books on tapes, and the pooling of resources.

Kemeny was by no means the first to be convinced that scholarly information could and should be stored, retrieved, and shared in a different way. The idealistic projects conceived by the Belgian gentleman-scholar Paul Otlet, considered to be the father of information science, at the end of the nineteenth century—culminating in the Mundaneum, which aimed at gathering all the world’s knowledge in one institution—were founded on his belief that books were an inadequate way to store information (Otlet, 1990). And decades before Kemeny, Vannevar Bush, the scientist who ended up leading the US Office of Scientific Research and Development during World War II, had already complained about how time-wasting and exasperating it had become to use university libraries, which relied on outdated and inadequate methods of transmitting research results (Bush, 2022)...."