Walt Crawford's Website: Online Extras
Libraries, Media, and the Future
This subsite contains "extras" relating to my interests in libraries, media, and the future.
Such extras may include versions of speeches that carry some particular interest, articles in this area that
didn't get published, or essays that don't really fit anywhere else.
Everything on this site is written by and copyright Walt Crawford, with all rights reserved. If you think something
here would interest someone else, why not send them the URL for this site or the particular page?
Three overall cautions:
- Some of these texts are much too long to read comfortably on-screen; I suggest you download them or print them
from your browser.
- I have generally not made any effort to clean up Word's idea of HTML output--and, worse, some older pieces
were formatted for Ventura publication. If you see strange "<xx>" or "@xx = " stuff,
that's the reason.
- If you're reading something identified as a speech, you can be reasonably confident that what you're reading
isn't what I actually said. It doesn't work that way.
My keynote for the ACRL program "Byting into Video: DVD and Networked Video Delivery," delivered July
8, 2000, at the ALA Annual Conference in Chicago, IL. Converted and mounted here based on listener request.
A tribute to the first decade of PACS-L--but not a memorial, since PACS-L reappeared in March 2000.
Note: if this one seems much more like a formal article than most of what's here, that's because it is--but
I believe it's too long and informal for formal publication in any of my normal venues. (If you're an editor and
disagree, let me know!).
I plan to prepare a 2,000-word version of this 7,900-word article and submit that shorter version to American
Libraries; if that happens (if I'm successful in boiling this down to one-quarter its current size) and it's
accepted (not a sure thing), the Web article may disappear for a couple of months around the time the shorter version
appears (or it may not). Similarly, if someone does offer to publish this long version and the terms make sense
to me, the Web version may go dark for a while.
An informal response to a letter from Bella Hass Weinberg in the January 2000 American Libraries.
Against my better judgment, I'm offering this lengthy, badly organized commentary. I suppose the title makes
it clear that I'm not one of Coffman's Crusaders.
A few comments on the speech and handout (below)--noting some of the failed predictions and good guesses in
the two texts.
"The Death of Print, Project Xanadu, and Other Nightmares"
The Arizona Talk: Added May 23, 1999
Until 1992, I had spoken once every year or two on some fascinating topic such as technical standards, typefaces,
or personal computing. Almost all of my writing was on personal computing and related issues, except for the occasional
article directly related to RLG (or, before that, UC Berkeley).
Then the Library Automation Round Table of the Arizona State Library Association invited me to give their program
at the 1992 ASLA conference in Phoenix. The people inviting me weren't sure what they wanted me to talk about,
but would get back to me.
By the time they got back to me, I knew what I wanted to talk about--all the nonsense I was reading about the
death of print, and similar issues. They said OK. That was, in essence, the start of almost all my speaking since
then, quite a few articles, and the two books I've written or cowritten since then.
(Technically, I did do a speech about future libraries and resources in 1989, at the California Library Association
conference, but I'd forgotten that speech and nothing much came of it. The written portion has long since vanished.)
I wound up doing a "speech and a half."
Here's the speech as it was prepared, and pretty much as it was given.
Here's the accompanying handout, which added material that I knew I couldn't cover
in an hour.
I haven't touched a word of this (other than trivial reformatting); if my seven-year-old comments are odd in
1999 (and odder in 2005!), so be it.
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Updated July 18, 2005
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