By this stage of the book it is to be hoped that librarians will have been persuaded about the potential for web metrics in their professional activities. Even if they are not quite ready to start advertising a web metric service to their users, they will at least recognize the importance of tracking their own metrics, and should be dissuaded from merely reaching for the closest numbers to hand.

This last chapter considers the potential future of web metrics and its relationship with librarians. As has been emphasized throughout this book new web technologies are frequently emerging, and so are the tools available to investigate them. It would be a fool's errand to attempt to predict the emergence of any specific new technology or tool, or the future dominance of any particular website, but it is reasonable to expect certain current trends to continue, such as the digitization of analogue content and the capturing of an increased amount of data from our daily lives. It may also be expected that much of this data will increasingly be open, although this is by no means definite. While some embrace the opportunities for new services that are offered by the sharing of information, others are concerned about the seemingly inevitable loss of privacy that comes with it. Each of these changes will have potential ramifications for web metrics and how they can be used by librarians.

Before we hurtle towards the future it is important to pause for a moment and reflect on how far we have come, not only in this book, but with web metrics.

How far we have come

As would be expected of a book called Web Metrics for Library and Information Professionals, this book has discussed a wide range of tools and sources. These have included: web crawlers, semantic web crawlers, social network sites, RDF triples, APIs, data extractors, data scrapers, data aggregators and graph visualization software. The full list would be a long one, and as we necessarily move rapidly from one technology to another, it is easy to overlook the scale of what is being discussed. After all, it is not unreasonable to liken the development of web crawlers and services such as Google Trends to early examples of scientific instruments that provided insights into the physical world.