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Vol. 44 No. 7 — September 2024

FEATURE
Strategic Takeaways From CIL 2024: Librarians Confronting Uncertainties Pick the Top 10
by Daniel W. Rasmus

The Power of Uncertainty

Uncertainty needs to become a discipline or an explicit topic in all disciplines. Misunderstanding uncertainty drives many political and intellectual divides, often undermining or delaying progress. In May 2024, Scientific American ran a series of podcasts exploring uncertainty as science’s foundation. Universal certainty, it asserted, would leave scientists with nothing to strive for, no need for evidence contrary to existing theory to create better theory.

In science, however, theory—even a theory that includes uncertainty—works effectively when applied and tested in practice. Even without a graviton—a theoretical particle that might convey gravity—there is little doubt that gravity exists. Many theories have converged to create an airplane design—one of which is gravity. The discovery of the graviton would not change the practice of powered flight, although the underlying equations may change.

Uncertainty plays a role in our daily lives, including the weather forecast and the actuarial tables used by insurers to predict a person’s life expectancy based on age, gender, and other factors. A better word would be “forecast,” as the actuarial tables represent a theory of life expectancy based on data. Most people do not conform precisely to the table’s estimate of their lifespans. Many factors play a role, including new scientific discoveries, changes in lifestyle or location, and emergent diseases.

While libraries enable the quest for certainty and help define its edges, the myriad resources that extend from them and connect them over the internet exist in a world of uncertainty. As with the factors contributing to lifespan, organizations and ideas exist under multivariant uncertainties. Scenario planning has evolved to help organizations identify uncertainty, monitor it, and, most importantly, meaningfully grapple with it. At the conference, I asked participants to provide a perspective on uncertainty through a manual survey. This was a project resulting from uncertainty itself, as it was a secondary approach to research when the conference canceled a workshop at the last minute.

Methodology

Scenario planning relies on some version of research that seeks the social, technological, economic, environmental, and political (STEEP) uncertainties that are both critical and uncertain to the focus area. In this case, it’s the future of libraries. Political, economic, social, technological, legal, and environmental (PESTLE) add legal components that sometimes straddle the boundaries between political and social uncertainties.

For the CIL conference research, I shared 31 future-of-library uncertainties gathered from interviews, secondary research, and workshops before the conference. The uncertainties spanned the STEEP categories, although no environmental uncertainty arose from the several dozen proposed uncertainties to meet the initial cutoff of being most critical to the future of libraries.

Given the limited time frame and desire for unbiased responses, I did not provide the respondents with documentation about the uncertainties. While it is common practice to educate clients on the uncertainties for which they will be voting, there was no opportunity to do so. Web-based documentation would likely result in uneven access to knowledge, with some reading the documentation and others not. Extensive documentation would also likely reduce the completion and participation rate in a non-sponsored, volunteer environment. Instead, I treated this exercise as a perception study in which the respondents brought their perceptions to the questions.

I did not prune the uncertainty list as I would in a client engagement—removing items considered within the realm of control—meaning clients might influence the outcome of the uncertainty. For example, while the general level of funding for libraries will remain uncertain, at the local level, libraries prepare budgets, meet with stakeholders, and sell ideas to constituencies. They have significant influence over their budgets, thus making funding for libraries less contextual and more in the realm of control. I reasoned that removing funding from the list without explanation might lead participants to question its veracity. In practice, taking this uncertainty out of the mix would not eliminate funding from the scenario narratives, but instead place it in the context of support for other public institutions such as universities and museums, as well as other forms of knowledge access and curated learning. Finally, I gave attendees the option to add uncertainties to the list. No write-in item received more than two votes.

Findings

While I did not share documentation about the uncertainties with the respondents, I will summarize the top 10 uncertainties. Note that not all items listed reflect a relationship to libraries. That is intentional. Scenario planning seeks to build stories that create a context for a client’s topic. The context should be larger than the domain under examination. In workshops, we often apply future-of-work scenarios to divergent problems, as the general attitudes and concepts that inform work narratives offer proxies that are applicable to other domains. As noted previously, I have removed funding for public libraries from this list. The following list represents the remaining top 10 items. The graphic (see the image to the right) shows the entirety of the results.

It is important to note that each uncertainty must incorporate two disparate and opposing poles. These poles provide the extremes for the uncertainty. Scenario planners assign values within narratives that fall between these extremes. That uncertainties hold a different value within each scenario narrative acts as a check on the uncertainty. If an uncertainty ends up with similar values across multiple narratives, it likely isn’t uncertain and should be removed from the list. Each uncertainty will include a paragraph overview that will end with the poles that describe the extremes for that uncertainty.

Library uncertainties from Computers in Libraries 2024 (click for full-size image)

Top 10 Uncertainties

1 Access to necessary and emerging technology, which is another way to frame the digital divide. The digital divide refers to the gap between those with access to and proficiency in technology and those without. Equitable access to necessary and emerging technology helps provide equitable access to digital content to prevent or not exacerbate inequalities that may not be in the interest of all stakeholders in the future.

Poles: equitable access ‹-› lack of access required to master necessary or emerging technology

2 Trust in information, which has become increasingly challenged through belief and governance systems disregarding facts for politics, fostering discrimination and otherness, creating or reinforcing conspiracy theories, and sowing discontent. Even proven science—and, more importantly, the scientific method—has come under attack in critical areas such as public health. Will AI, currently prone to hallucinations and the fabrication of sources, mature and better represent fact-based sources, or will large language models be purposefully built with misinformation in mind, trained on datasets that deliberately employ biased information in service to a political or social movement?

Poles: misinformation grows, often purposefully ‹-› misinformation wanes, although some still squeezes through

3 The rise of AI in the future presents both exciting opportunities and significant challenges. While AI has the potential to revolutionize industries and improve various aspects of human life, it raises issues such as ethics, job displacement, privacy and data security, accountability, transparency, bias, fairness, regulation, and governance.

Poles: AI as co-pilot/partner ‹-› AI as overlord or overseer (either as a tool of autocracy or of its own volition)

4 What drives political decision making? A complex interplay of various issues, interests, ideologies, and external factors such as party affiliation, public opinion, economic considerations, social/cultural values, special interests, budget constraints, and media influence political decision making. This complex mix makes it difficult to forecast if emotion and popularism or logic, restraint, and reason will drive political decision making.

Poles: facts/evidence ‹-› emotion/ideology

5 Fairness and equity, inclusiveness, and social equality—As technology plays a more significant role in hiring, management processes, government interactions, and social experience, there is a risk of perpetuating bias and discrimination. Algorithms and AI systems used for decision making can inadvertently amplify existing biases or create new ones, leading to unequal opportunities and outcomes for individuals from marginalized groups.

Poles: increasingly fair, inclusive, and equitable ‹-› discrimination becomes increasingly prevalent, even sanctioned

6 Homelessness, which has significant social, economic, and urban impacts on cities and their residents. The effects can vary depending on the scale of the issue, local policies, and available resources. The impact of homelessness on cities includes public health, public safety, a strain on public services, economic costs, reduced tourism and business, environmental degradation, quality of life, and community policy.

Poles: homelessness is decreasing ‹-› homelessness is constant to rising

7 Trends in reading—Reading is on the cusp of a significant technological transformation that may shift some consumer behaviors and change educational expectations. The acceptance, rejection, or more casual adoption of immersive technologies will offer new engagement models for reading. AI-powered pre-reading tools with audio and visual content may provide an alternative to reading for many.

Poles: reading renaissance ‹-› the lost art of reading

8 Content censorship is a complex and evolving issue that involves balancing concerns such as freedom of expression, protection of vulnerable groups, and societal norms. Some of the current problems in content censorship include online disinformation, hate speech, online harassment, political manipulation and election interference, and platform accountability. The traditional issues of aligning (or not) with cultural and moral norms, copyright and fair use, privacy, data protection, and freedom of the press bring rich possibilities for how the future might unfold.

Poles: prohibited/rare and transparent ‹-› regular and expected

9 Approach to metadata—AI may potentially transform the generation, management, and use of metadata. While some metadata generation is already automated, the rise of generative AI suggests a couple of paths: one that involves much higher rates of automation and another that involves knowledge systems that encode the entirety of content.

Poles: human augmented ‹-› automated/invisible

10 Library relationships to publishers—The relationship between libraries and publishers continues to evolve, as both entities adapt to technological advancements, changing user preferences, and new content distributionmodels. Most library systems negotiate local deals with publishers for print books and econtent. Costs and constraints on econtent have been increasing.

Poles: collective ‹-› independent and isolated (Note: This uncertainty, like library funding, falls within the realm of control for libraries. Unlike library funding, it requires a fundamental re-evaluation of the library content acquisition model.)

It is important to note that most of the poles related to the uncertainties are not opposites. The best extreme uncertainty edge definitions incorporate subtlety and nuance. Boundaries that prove too definitive lack credibility in a world more often represented by experiences that occur along a continuum than those with only one value.

Beyond the Findings

Understanding is not the goal of scenario planning. The techniques allow organizations to imagine varying futures in which the values associated with the uncertainty differ. The traditional approach to scenario planning uses a matrix that’s driven by the most critical and uncertain uncertainties to create quadrants. Each of those quadrants becomes the canvas for a rich story about a plausible future. The stories help challenge the assumptions that underlie strategic planning. They permit people to think beyond organizational and intellectual constraints, often leading to innovative approaches to overcoming obstacles or suggestions for new products or services. For organizations that invest in long-term scenario planning, uncertainty becomes a focal point for monitoring the future as it unfolds. How the uncertainties evolve, shift, retract, and perhaps eventually coalesce around a value proves to be a powerful tool for anticipation and foresight.

Navigating Toward the Future of Libraries

Libraries are an ancient institution. Throughout history, they have been the subject of reverence and disdain depending on the whims of governments, ideologies, and religions. They have been the repository of stories and, recently, the destroyer of narrative, as history often gives way to expedience, since the present overwrites the past. Scenario planning seeks to recognize the context of history. By identifying uncertainty and building multiple, diverse futures, it aims to help organizations navigate obstacles and, most profoundly, envision better futures and actionable paths that can help make those futures possible.