A new year always provokes thoughts of what has gone and what is to come. The news media, feeding our liking for the comfort of the repetition of the annual cycle, devote much space in January to this kind of reflection, which often seems not to change much from one year to the next. I admit to rarely finding anything uplifting, or even convincing, in this sort of ruminating. Did any of them spot the credit crunch coming, and tell us to take evasive action ? Or advise that all the world would twitter ? I think not.
Richard Watson
Of the various points raised in Watson’s ‘history’ of the coming year, the most striking to me, not least because it is very much in line with what others have suggested, is his idea of a “flight to the physical”. This builds on his previous comments about about the paradoxical isolation caused by ubiquitous digital communication – “we can get instant news and tweets throughout the day, but we don’t know our neighbours’ names” – and a consequent hunger for shared experiences in a common physical space. Watson writes “If virtual connection can never match its physical equivalent, this is partly because we associate digital with speed, being disposable and therefore of low value, and partly because we like to hold and touch real things… Downloading a video is easy and efficient, but it’s a soulless experience compared with going to a good video shop, having a chat with a movie buff, and looking at row upon row of illustrated titles”. The he moves on to the – by now increasingly common but still welcome – pean to an unfashionable institution: ” the public library, feared moribund in recent years, is in its element because it’s about much more than books. It’s a quiet and safe community space, an experience that enables you to access expertise from commercially uncorrupt resources, and that’s both ethical and resource friendly”.
A similar note is struck by Fleur Britten in her Sunday Times magazine article on what’s new for 2010. Quoting the trendspotter Marian Salzman, she notes the need for ‘emotional spaces .. to retreat from the modern buzz to ‘safe spaces’ .. get low key”. Although the L-word is not mentioned, the message seems similar.
is digital the future of paper?
On the whole, though I make no claim to be much of a futurologist, I’m with Watson. Particularly because of his idea that “we’ll see phrases such as slow media emerge as people realise that if you read things on paper you are more relaxed, you register more, you reflect and see the big picture”. As one of my PhD students is researching the idea of slow information, I feel comfortably ahead of the trend.
This is not, it has to be said, an immediately gripping book, despite the best attempts of the authors, or perhaps the publisher, to present it with a Harry Potter-like title . Subtitled ‘Subdivide and conquer with LC subdivision!’, it would seem to be a good candidate for one of those competitions for most obscure or nerdish titles of the year. Is there really a book to be written, not even about the Library of Congress Headings – themselves perhaps not the most immediately accessible or popular topic – but just about the sub-headings.
An article in Intelligent Life magazine for summer 2009 tried to decide which was ‘
My vote for most important year ? I suppose I would go with the introduction of printing, since we don’t have a good date for the start of writing. But, more parochially, and as I’ve written in an editorial for the Journal of Documentation (2009, vol. 65, no. 3) , I have a fondness for 1759. Establishment of the British Museum, start-up of Kew Gardens as a serious botanical institution; and, according to Frank McFlynn, when the Brits took over the world [McLynn, F., 1759: The year Britain became master of the world, London: Jonathan Cape, 2004].
In a 
Most of us have problems with remembering things at time. Memory problems usually go one way – we can’t remember things. Drastic loss of memory has been a theme of many books (I can, just about, remember Asimov’s Currents of Space as being the first with this theme that I read) and movies (the Bourne series, I understand, not having seen any of them, has this theme). The lack of incentive for memorisation has been lamented over thousands of years, from the increasing use of printed books reducing the need for the 
A possible solution is proposed by Viktor Mayer-Schonberger in a new book 
