In 1883, Charles Ammi Cutter, then librarian at the Boston Athenaeum, wrote a futuristic essay entitled “The Buffalo Public Library in 1983” (which is quoted by Alex Wright in his book, Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages – which I now have in hand). Very excited.
Cutter imagined what a library might look like in 100 years, circa 1983. Read the essay. The New York Times, dated August 17, 1883, said that it was ‘a very clever composition, and elicited much applause.’
In 2008, it serves to remind us that speculation is a precursor to observation. Cutter speculates that readers in 1983 will sit at desks equipped with “little keyboards” through which they will connect with central electronic catalogs, ordering books from the stacks by punching in call numbers. He foresaw networks of libraries connected by a “fonographic foil” to enable communication telegraphically and to access other collections readily so that “all libraries in the country…are practically one library”.
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Sounds like the web to me. – and Cutter was only about ~10 or so years off.
Can you predict the future for libraries, 100 years from now – 2108? I’ll share more juicy tidbits from Wright’s book as I encounter them.
Yvonne Chan
lse721
“speculation is a precursor to observation”- how true! as medical students, we used to be taught that ‘what the mind does not expect, the eye does not see’…Cutter does indeed speculate with humbling foresight.
“speculation is a precursor to observation”- how true! as medical students, we used to be taught that ‘what the mind does not expect, the eye does not see’…Cutter does indeed speculate with humbling foresight.
Hi Chandra,
I always learn something from reading history, and about people who have tried to envision solutions before their time. And you are right – it’s humbling!
Thanks
Dean
also reminded me of Mark Twain and the “Yankee in King Arthur’s Court”, both in style and substance.