The aim of this paper is to consider some possible directions for the future development of our library
cum remote storage facility at University College Cork (UCC) in Ireland and the impact of digital
knowledge products on such a future. It is an exercise in crystal ball gazing. The paper attempts to explore
an emerging intellectual landscape, one no longer bound by the implications of the physical storage
of printed knowledge and it considers what the long term implications might be. It does this by seeking
to frame questions about the unknown, about answers as yet to emerge out of what is known through
past experience gained in a print technology culture. It questions possible futures for print collections. It
questions what are the implications for the future storage of knowledge if we abandon print technology
as a storage medium.
The paper is in three parts beginning with a stage setting exercise which profiles what currently exists
and which gestures towards a vision of what might be. This is followed by a questioning of the challenges
and pathways which implementing change might imply. The paper concludes with some reflections.
Its core theme is the possibilities remote storage could offer in the transition from print based to
digital libraries.
For the purposes of this paper the word digital is loosely defined to mean existence in electronic form
and either created in that form or imaged from printed media. Knowledge is defined as information to
which some form of intellectual modeling has been applied such as the added value of scholarship or
wisdom. By print preservation, I mean preserving book collections not simply because they may carry
texts which are not reproduced elsewhere in electronic from. But, because the libraries created from
these collections, store and transmit knowledge to us in their own distinctive way and this is something
which I believe should be preserved.