OCLC's Environmental Scan was published back in 2003, and provided a high level view of the significant issues and trends impacting libraries, museums, archives and similar organisations now and in the future.

Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources was released earlier this week, and provides a different perspective on many of those same issues by leveraging a Harris Interactive poll of over 3,300 information consumers in Australia, Canada, India, Singapore, the United Kingdom and the United States.

“The findings indicate that information consumers view libraries as places to borrow print books, but they are unaware of the rich electronic content they can access through libraries. Even though information consumers make limited use of these resources, they continue to trust libraries as reliable sources of information.”

In this conversation, recorded just prior to the report's publication, George Needham extracts the implications of both reports, and engages in a wide-ranging discussion around changing user expectations, and some of the ways in which we need to consider transforming and further enhancing our existing library services.

Resources:

• 2003 OCLC Environmental Scan: Pattern Recognition - http://www.oclc.org/reports/2003escan.htm
• Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources - http://www.oclc.org/reports/2005perceptions.htm
• Campbell, A. & Metzner, C.A. 1950, Public Use of the Library and Other Sources of Information. Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Institute for Social Research
• It's All Good, OCLC's blog inspired by the Scan and more... - http://scanblog.blogspot.com/

This conversation was conducted by telephone, from Birmingham (UK) to Dublin, Ohio (USA), on Wednesday 23 November 2005.

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