John introduces the University of Rural England, a fictional place where students and faculty suffer the same weaknesses. - Martin Fenner

Dead tree media will become history? - AJCann

Google wave will be history? - AJCann

+1 AJCann - Bob O'Hara

i can tell my future involves a nice cold pint :) - Ian Mulvany

Forget the monkeys, black swans loom over the horizon. - AJCann

For many people the present is the future. People born before 1980 still know a world without computers and for us a lot what we use today is futuristic. - Martin Fenner

Ian, so your clairvoyance only extends about 90 minutes into the future? - Victor / Mendeley Team

Them, Martin? Are you really that young? - Bob O'Hara

Climate change and tipping points? - AJCann

when the lizards rule, experiments on monkeys will be a lot less controversial - Ian Mulvany

At least Second Life will be history. - AJCann

Ian, they turned off the air condition so we buy more at the bar downstairs ;). - Martin Fenner

Bob, I'm younger in my mind. But was born before Woodstock took place. - Martin Fenner

A backup is not an archive. - AJCann

We need robust mechanisms to protect knowledge offline. - AJCann

This is the third time in a few weeks that I heard about the importance of making backups of digital information as a great challenge in the future. Have to think more about this. John was showing an old floppy disk with a PhD thesis on it. My thesis is on a floppy disk written with a word processor/operating system that has been dead for many years. - Martin Fenner

You don't have paper copies of your thesis Martin? I do of mine. - AJCann

Of course I have paper copies. This just shows that analog formats might still be the safest format for storing information. - Martin Fenner

The technology horizon is 5-7 years. Predictions beyond that are speculation. - AJCann

Question is: Why hasn't the future happened yet? :-) - AJCann

Sigh. Paper is an inherently unstable medium. We should be publishing on stone (Twitter -> Chipper?) - AJCann

(This was a great way to finish the presentations at Solo09. Thanks!) - Allyson Lister

http://twitter.com/stressr... "As a geologist, I find "set in stone" to be a very odd metaphor for permanence." - Bora Zivkovic

Jeremy John of the digital archives project at the British Library can read all these old formats in the digital scriptorum he's built. Impressive. (includes paper tape and punch cards which were not shown in this presentation but which I recall my parents using way back when). - Maxine

After the conference is before the conference: would really like to see a session on digital archives in a future conference. - Martin Fenner

a session on digital archives sounds good, Martin. Perhaps librarians and infoscientists can do one in January in NC? Rile them up! - Bora Zivkovic

Jeremy John would be my recommendation. Was an evolutionary biologist before heading up the BL digital lives project. - Maxine

Thanks, Maxine. Do you know him and have contact info for him? Perhaps give him a heads-up? - Bora Zivkovic

Yes, I know him - have been involved with his project. Here's the link to him and all about his project/conference. http://www.bl.uk/digital... I'm sure he'd be delighted to come to the conference and/or suggest appropriate speakers for specific aspects of this rather large subject, if you want to "drill down" into one particular specialism. (See digital lives conf programme - http://www.bl.uk/digital...) - Maxine