| Vol. 23, No. 3 | February 1996 | ISSN 1063-9136 |
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Message from the ChairDiane Fortner |
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A Virtually Real Future: Getting the New Year Before It Gets Us "The world of the future will be an ever more demanding struggle against the limitations of our intelligence, not a comfortable hammock in which we can lie down to be waited upon by our robot slaves." --Norbert Weiner, Wired, Dec 1995, p.140. When you read this Joanne Goode and I will already be back from the chill of Cleveland and the SLA Winter Conference, where Joanne will begin networking for the 1997 conference and I will tie up loose ends for the June Boston conference. Another new year, new time... This holiday I found myself repeating myself in our seasonal letter to friends, talking again about the RUSH of time, how it tromps on and on, with little decorum. Even re- reading Robert |
Grudin does little to dispel this whip-lash
effect. Although at work I often plow the same furrow over and over, I also
sense this same breath-taking RUSH of time. We librarians not only surf
the Web; we surf change. And I think most of us are getting pretty good
at it. At times it is simply exhilarating. Many of us in PAM are university librarians, our futures and probably our philosophies tied to a belief in the good of education. Like Russian nested dolls, we are enlarged as we push through the concentric layers toward the light. We are both information professionals and educators. Yet, at the same time, we are balanced on the shiny edge of a new wave, the light-speed future, where, we are told, our profession is a Shape-shifter, higher education is under interrogation, and our children and nieces and nephews must expect to invent themselves and reinvent themselves every 5-7 years in the |