More LITA Top Technology Trends Notes

Here are my own notes from this ALA session:

6/29/08

LITA TOP TECHNOLOGY TRENDS – Notes
E. Grassian
UCLA College Library
estherg@library.ucla.edu

• Karen Coyle
• Eric Morgan – U Notre Dame
• John Bliberg – Darien Library
• Meredith Farkas – Norwich U
• Clifford Lynch
• Karen Schneider
• Marshall Breeding
• Karen Coombs, U Houston
• … San Jose Library

NOTE: There were 2 remote panelists, but a very bad audio connection for both, so I couldn’t really hear anything they said. There was also a very interesting chat session displayed at the front of the packed room of about 750 people, standing room only. In spite of negative comments by some bloggers, I thought the chat was great and added a lot to the panelists’ presentations. I hope they continue to offer it and continue to broadcast it. The only problem with the chat was that you had to pay for wifi access at the hotel where the session was held. I think it was $13 for access for the day, so not everyone who would have liked to participate in the chat was willing to pay that amount to do so. EG

1. Marshall Breeding

• =>Open source trend
• ILS is dead was topic of prior session; good to see it reinvigorated
• OPAL, e.g., going well, mostly in NY
• More action now on public library side than academic, but just matter of time
• Multi-institutional open source projects coming on radar—e.g., Duke
• =>Open data—e.g., open APIs
• DLF: ILS Discovery Layer…
• Berkeley Accord…
• Openness can be marketing pitch—could just be in name
• Are they really open; doing new things that deliver value through openness

2. Karen Schneider

• Broadband…
• Librarians have resumed writing their own software & steering their own ships
• Small literary journals are going online as open source because they barely survived as print pubs; now struggling due to increased postage & other costs

3. Sarah… [Couldn’t understand a word she said, as she was one of the remote panelists, and there were audio problems.]

4. Clifford Lynch

• Open source…
• Growing enthusiasm in higher education, etc.
• Not a panacea—people think leprechauns will appear magically & solve all of their problems
• But will have equally unconstructed backlash against open source
• Need to not overreact in any direction
• When does it [open source] make sense; when is it just appealing to solve problems and when not
• Virtual organizations
• Roots in collaborating across the network
• People need to be able to work together & set up in agile fashion;
• synchronous & asynchronous ways
• BEYOND BEING THERE – NSF Report
• Technology around telepresence—interesting
• Travel will become very difficult soon
• Mixture of physical & telepresence will become more common; need to get better at this; more routine for meetings and collaborations; lots of ramifications for teaching/learning/delivery of info systems
• Net Neutrality
• Pressure to get more affordable broadband, but deeply wrapped up in net neutrality
• Censoring component could come into play
• Remote storage, network based or cloud storage
• Starting to take off in bigger way
• Significant implications for preservation, continuity of operations, privacy info
• Materials available remotely in settings outside libraries—e.g., photo collections on Flickr, Annotate; letting go of holdings; put in context where of value to people, beyond institution
• opens dialogue between cultural heritage institutions, and others
• Info overload retranslated into range of social networking/software systems
• How quickly will we run into sense of overload phenomena

=>KAREN’S comment (Meebo)—couldn’t get it down, though…

5. Roy Tennant

• Age of experimentation
• Extensible catalog project
• Retooling for constant change
• Must get good at extracting data from whatever system you use, even if not good at migrating
• Must get good at analyzing/manipulating data in useful piles
• Must get really good at change and learning; take responsibility for our own
• learning in terms of finding sources of info that will help us learn something new

• Must help those who work for us in learning too—send them to courses, help them learn so they can go forward
• •Either take full control of ILSs, or give up completely—must get out of middle ground; change needed, but too hard to change
• Q: What can library schools do to prepare people for constant change
• A: More personality traits than specific knowledge; but need to teach people
• at least one programming course before they graduate so they can talk to programmers…

6. Meredith Farkas

• Role of social software in collecting local knowledge, created by libraries
• e.g., Louden, VA has “Loudenpedia”
• Could be online club of local community
• Growing role of library as creative technology lab
• Library could have new technology, like slide scanner that people could use,
• but may not want to buy for themselves
• Could help people with access to expensive software as well as hardware
• Archiving blogs as historical artifacts, as window into our culture
• National Library of Australia and National Library of Singapore are archiving these
• U of Michigan provides blogs to students & faculty & they may choose to have them archived at their university

7. John Bilberg

• Green Technology
• Comment on chat—how much electricity does Google use to run its 1 million servers…
• Semantic web [—sort of “fuzzy logic” searching (EG)]
• Swedish (Natl Lib?) may become entirely semantic for all records
• Portable media devices—mini PCs, iPhone, e.g. handhelds change expectations
• not uniform pieces of technology heavily customized by users, tailored to their needs; personal relationship with info; much personalized reliance on them
• Library as content creator, not just content provider
• Users expect presence to be well presented, well crafted
• They don’t appreciate it, they just expect it & are highly judgmental if not well designed
• Will judge content based on container (design)

Q from chat: How do we excel at open source; value; elevator speech re open source?

• Should be for your own library—how does it make your library better?

Summize?
Tweemes?
[Note: These came up on chat & I don’t know what they are. E.]

Q: Is there any value to the library server room?

• Trend toward enterprise level server(s)

CLIFFORD:

• Trends—toward centralizing stuff outside the library—e.g., power, heat, security; accelerates those trends

9. Karen Holmes

• APIs
• [Karen Coyle slidecast: yourbigwig.com/showcase.show_now]

10. Eric

• Scholarly publishing—not just article, but data that supports the article
• How will we collect and provide access to that data for a long time
• Mobile devices
• Becoming more and more the norm
• Not really either or for use of technology as opposed to use of physical spaces—it’s EITHER AND Web API to get your stuff out there
• Increasingly important to have web sites that have “bling”; if not, people see them as boring—they do judge a book by its cover
• Next – Generation Catalog—not right word, nor is “discovery system”
• Increasingly “indexes”
• Like back of book
• Then provide services against index
• Google does FIND very very well
• Next niche libraries have is allowing patrons to use content that they find in dif ways—turn catalog into tool to do other things
• tag
• review
• delete
• index
• compare/contrast things—categorize them into “piles”
• could do this with pictures, articles, email addresses; trace citation forwards/backwards
• libraries haven’t done this because they always serve a community and library expected to know its community
• does Google know its community?
• you will, though, and will be able to provide services against the content for your community

***APPLY SERVICES AGAINST CONTENT***§

11. Karen Coyle

• Wants to be able to search catalog and dbs while walking around in stacks in library on mobile device
• Comment from chat: Can already do that with an iPhone…
• She’s beginning to write reports that you couldn’t pay her to read—re bibliographic control
• Future of bib control won’t have control—will be giant mashup; if we don’t make extreme changes, it won’t involve libraries
• we won’t do this because it’ll be about linking; everyone having access to
• data now easier to get bib data from Amazon & publishers than from libraries
• We must give up having all records we create the same
• We don’t have to tell them that 2 things are the same—can just say we have lots of items that are similar—do you want to see them?
• Increased user to user interaction

Q: What kinds of skills should we look for to make some of this happen?

Eric: About thinking systematically, step by step & creatively; must have art thinking & science thinking; origami is “artscience”=art + science

Meredith: Someone willing to question everything; someone intolerant, try things that don’t work; patient, diplomatic skills to push things through

Karen S.: People impatient with mediocrity; know something about excellence from outside the library profession