Six Verbs for the Next 20 Years

The TechCrunch blog reported on Tuesday of this week on the keynote address at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. Wired co-founder Kevin Kelly talked about six long-term trends he see for the next 20 years. The six verbs used to desribe those trends are:

• Screening


• Interacting


• Sharing


• Flowing


• Accessing


• Generating.

You can read the details on all six in the TechCrunch post. The two I see as most important for archives, and libraries, are the last two: accessing and generating. By accessing he means: "We're moving to a world where it's about accessing information and media and not owning it." He's talking about things like Netflix and music. But it is definitely a verb information specialists like archivists and librarians can get behind!

Generating means "'The Internet is the world's largest copy machine,' Kelly says. Going forward, there will be an importance placed on things that cannot be easily copied. A key to this is an easy way to pay and content that is hard to copy. Immediacy is a key--if you want something right now versus when it can be copied. Personalization is another key, he says." Again, I'm sure they're not thinking specifically about what archives have, but archivists should be paying attention to this one.

With constantly dwiddling budgets, can archivists plug into this trend to earn money for their archives? Do you have genealogical materials or photographs in your collections that users will pay for? How do you make those materials available on the Internet and take advantage of that need for wanting a copy right now? Does this mean even more attention to MPLP in order to have the time to spend generating the indexes needed to make the saleable materials "accessible" and "easily copied"?

Do scholars, and History Day students, and others wanting to use the more poorly-processed and described collections become the losers in this tendy new world? Or, can you turn around the money generated to then support other parts of your collections that don't see that same kind of need by users for immediacy and therefore payment?