The fact that predicting the future is a tricky proposition doesn't stop people from trying. It makes for good punditry, and by the time the future's arrived, most observers will have forgotten the prediction anyway.

Unless, of course, someone publishes them. Which American Libraries has, over the years—so let's review some excellent, and less so, predictions.

16-hour work week
In the March 1933 issue (p. 133), the Bulletin published a speech made by B. Lamar Johnson, librarian and dean of instruction at Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri, to "Normal School and Teachers College Librarians" at the Midwinter Meeting in December 1932, proposing increasing value for books once the Depression ended. After giving highlights of amazing accomplishments in industrial technology, he declared that "Technocrats suggest that this situation will soon result in conditions which will make it necessary for workers to labor only four hours a day for four days a week. Whether or not such a condition becomes a reality, certainly we can look forward to a civilization in which leisure time and consequently the use of books will play a part of increased importance."

So, a sixteen-hour work week? I wish. I'll give him partial credit for his thoughts on the increased focus on recreation, although most of that credit disappears for his failure to imagine that other forms of recreation might provide harsh competition.

Chicago Branch Plans
The February 1976 issue of American Libraries (pp. 95–96) reported on the opening of Chicago's Carter G. Woodson Regional Library, and reviewed the 1969 study by Lowell Martin, Library Response to Urban Change, that set out recommendations for the city's system.

Martin recommended a central library, ten large regional libraries, and many diversified "branch" programs throughout the cities. The article noted that those ten regional libraries were probably over-ambitious, "even for that healthier economic milieu."

Thirty-one years on, Chicago has just two regional libraries, rather than ten. It opened a central library in 1991 and has in the past two decades focused on building and renovating its network of neighborhood branches.

AACR3
At a LITA program at the 1979 Annual Conference (July/August, p. 413), panelists were asked for a prediction of publication of the 3rd edition of the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules. As depicted at right, Maurice Freedman predicted, Match Game-style, 1984, while others on the panel suggested "never."

While predicting can be precarious, the Joint Steering Committee for Revision of the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules has announced an early 2009 release of RDA:Resource Description and Access to supercede AACR2.

Hypertext
At the 1987 Annual Conference (July/August, p. 558), LITA president Ray DeBuse declared that scientists would begin to use hypertext break through the limits of the printed page by the end of the decade. (AL's description of the idea: "You're at the beach browsing through something by Dostoevski on your reading machine when you remember there's a Cubs game going on. You watch an inning or so—on the same machine—then get back to Dostoevski. As you peruse the text, you call up a citation and a critical essay on the novel and check the translation of a Russian word—all on the same screen. You're using hypertext.")

Well, we still call them "computers," it took a couple extra years for the technology to integrate into American life, and I'm not sure how many people combine Dostoevski, the beach, and the Cubs, but overall this one's pretty close.

Economic Understanding
There's one final "prediction"—or more accurately, an implied prediction based on a grand misreading of the current situtation— that I'd like to share. It comes from Edward Eyre Hunt, secretary of the U.S. president's Committee on Recent Economic Changes, who commended Americans' ever-growing economic understanding, with the implication that it would lead to continued prosperity. "In the good old days, Wall Street would never have heard of an article in the Atlantic Monthly by a Harvard professor. But only a few months ago an article by W.Z. Ripley upset the street and every broker and runner had to read that article. And what has been going on in the financial district appears to have been going on throughout the country.

This, I suggest, is a new thing in America and it is to be attributed at least in part to the persistent efforts of the President to educate all of us to think in economic terms."

Lovers of irony may be able to guess that the U.S. president was Herbert Hoover, and Hunt's speech was made May 13, 1929, at the Annual Conference in Washington D.C., less than six months before the stock market crash kick-started the Great Depression, and published in the August conference proceedings (p. 245).

—Greg Landgraf, American Libraries editorial assistant