Libraries of people*

Libraries are in transition and are facing new kinds of challenges. Many challenges are due to the nature of the information objects, information resources that libraries are responsible for. The content of libraries has changed; it is not just text, but multimedia and multilingual; modern libraries also have massive sets of statistics, images, music, computer code, biological codes, etc. Another change is that data is dynamic. Documents also have relationships that exist both within that document and as that document evolves over time. Digital Content acquires history just like people and institutions. All these lead to challenges for indexing to support search and retrieval. The challenge is to combine link analysis, probabilistic estimates, the authors’ keywords, indexing by professional indexers and social tagging into something optimal. Retrieval should also blend into information seeking behaviour of the end user. Recent research indicates the importance of bringing the users into the loop, i.e. Human-computer information retrieval. The research community interested in information seeking is looking at the human side to address the problems beyond just good matching of documents and queries. This problem has not been solved; but there is considerable progress in understanding the information seeking behaviour of end users. Retrieval tasks that seek The primary goal of library and information services today should be to try and build bridges between people's personal information infrastructures and the technical aspects of information. Work done at UNC with video retrieval systems and at Microsoft with retrieving icon snippets from Web pages have helped in understanding design requirements of information systems and also in identifying appropriate performance measures beyond Recall and Precision. There is also the question of how research in IR and ISB could be applied to digital libraries. It is suggested that digital libraries need to start participating in the management and perpetuation of personal memories which is not normally a library function. Finally the notion of proflections – an individual's projection of himself and others’ reflections on the individual – is presented and the role of libraries in this is examined. There is a need to redefine the role of the library in this emerging context.