I am unable to answer this question definitively, but I see it as an opportunity to be exploited. Libraries, IMHO, are about collecting, organizing, archiving, disseminating, and sometimes evaluating data, information, and knowledge. We could take our professional experience, package it up in software, and embed the software into mass storage devices. By doing so we should be able to suppliment the user’s experience with their masses of data/information saved on their storage devices.

If this portable library represents ‘my story’, how will libraries help me define, gather, and maintain (update/weed) this story? I think librarians will increasingly look a lot like publishers and authors.

This is not true of my library’s website as yet. Our news feed can be picked up through Bloglines, but our public does not seem to have discovered this. Perhaps we should tell them.

I did not realize it, but we are starting to integrate into other environments, too. We have placed links to our reference help onto our local historical society’s website. Perhaps we should put links to our databases onto the village government website. Users would still have to enter their library card numbers. It might increase our service to the community.

As to smarter clients (eg AJAX) I agree – and it is refreshing to see someone in this domain recognise the importance of XUL like technologies.

btw Take a look at http://silkworm.talis.com ….. says it all.

Dave Errington, CEO, Talis.

The ubiquity of storage has passed the point where it is an unmixed blessing. You can carry a substantial library around with you, but with nothing better than a file system to organize it, it’s a big jumble. We get some assistance with the rise of desktop search engines like Google Desktop and Yahoo Desktop (et al) – but they still need work to handle the beefy flash drives and portable hard drive devices we plug into them on the fly.