INTERVIEW
Join futurist Martin Hamilton at ILI 2018
IN the run up to this year’s Internet Librarian International Conference, Information Professional talks to Day Two Keynote Martin Hamilton – Futurist, Jisc, UK.
Martin says his career was inspired by early visits to his local library and a love of science fi ction books. He has worked in technology and related IT fi elds, includ- ing co-writing the fi rst Opac for BLCMP (which later became Talis) and running a supercomputer centre for Midlands uni- versities and has “been in Jisc’s orbit for a lot of that time”, before actually joining the organisation.
“There’s a fascinating dichotomy around
sci-fi that informs much of my work at Jisc” says Martin. “Technological and societal trends often creep up on us unnoticed, but then with hindsight it’s perfectly obvious that this or that change was inevitable.” He points to smartphones as a technology that is now ubiquitous, saying: “Consider the way that the smartphone has slowly but surely become so dominant in our lives. I have a ‘Dorian Gray drawer’ at home where I keep a few of the things that phones have made obsolete. They include a map, compass, camera, Walkman, CD, timetable, tourist guide, postcard and dictionary. I couldn’t fi t in the barometer or the spirit level and, of course, there are plenty more.
“Looking back now it seems quite obvious that people would leap at the opportunity to have all these things at their fi ngertips, once the technology and connectivity were good enough, but it’s not long at all since companies like Kodak and Blockbuster were the dominant play- ers in their fi elds and the idea of a pocket supercomputer giving access to all the world’s information would have seemed totally unrealistic.”
That step-change in expectations about what can be achieved is often diffi cult to spot in the real world before it has happened. And while there are nascent technologies emerging, it is not always clear where the benefi ts will come. Martin says all librarian and informa- tion workers should be looking for the opportunities, not waiting for them to appear. He said: “When it comes to new
20 INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL September 2018
technologies like AI, my challenge for library and information professionals is to look around and picture how they could be used to innovate and improve the ser- vices that are already on off er.” He adds that there is a danger in embracing new technological advances without thinking about whether they add any value to services. He said: “We should be really careful to diff erentiate between the hype and the reality around new technologies like these. There’s a couple of particular tendencies I’m see- ing right now – one is to add blockchain to just about any project to make it seem all magical and sparkly, and the other is to treat just about anything done by a computer as ‘AI’.
“These are both quite pernicious trends. The truth is that there are some very interesting potential applications of blockchain, but in most cases people are essentially using blockchain as a database. We’ve had databases for a long time, and we’re quite good at them. Blockchain is like a very slow database that only has a few functions, and in many cases wastes vast amounts of energy carrying out mean-
Martin Hamilton looks to the future for Jisc.
Internet Librarian International 2018 The Library Innovation Conference 16 & 17 October 2018, Workshops on 15 October 2018, Olympia, London.
www.internet-librarian.com
ingless proof-of-work calculations. We can do a lot better than this. If we get it right, then blockchain could be a really powerful way to track citations and enable code/data re-use.” IP
● Read the full version of this interview
www.cilip.org/martinhamilton.
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