What Next for Libraries? Making Sense of the Future

The JISC Observatory provides horizon-scanning of technological developments which may be of relevance to the UK’s higher and further education sectors.

The JISC Observatory Team has developed systematic processes for the scanning, sense-making and synthesis activities for the work. This paper summarises the work of the JISC Observatory and related activities carried out by the author.

The paper outlines how the processes can be applied in a local context to ensure that institutions are able to gather evidence in a systematic way and understand and address the limitations of evidence-gathering processes. The paper describes use of open processes for interpreting the evidence and suggests possible implications of the horizon-scanning activities for policy-making and informing operational practices.

The paper concludes by encouraging the take-up of open approaches to the gathering and interpretation of the evidence used to inform policy-making.