Since I’m late to the game I will steal borrow a couple of trends that my esteemed colleagues have already noted and throw in one of my own.
- New Catalog Possibilities – Starting with NCSU’s Endeca-powered catalog, there has been a definite trend of moving to systems not marketed by the typical (and now smaller) set of library vendors. Another option that large libraries and consortia in particular are exploring is using some form of WorldCat from OCLC as their catalog. Still more options can be found in the open source world, with Koha and now Evergreen. In fact, I believe that Sept. 5, 2006 will long be remembered as the day when the ILS world irrevocably changed. This is the day over 250 Georgia libraries began using an open source ILS they wrote themselves from scratch. The potential significance of this is hard to overstate.
- Open source goes mainstream – See #1 above. The fact that a large library consortium could bet the farm on an open source solution (and win) is a dramatic event that will serve to highlight for others that open source does not mean unsupported or unsupportable. In fact, the Evergreen team has launched their own support vendor (Equinox Software) to support others who wish to replace their ILS with Evergreen.
- Massive digitization means massive opportunities and massive challenges – The massive digitization projects of Google and OCA are pouring thousands (and soon millions) of digitized books onto the Internet. What does this mean for libraries and the users we serve? Sorry, this is Top Tech Trends, not Top Tech Solutions. I don’t know all of the implications of this yet, but I do know that we need to be thinking about this issue long and hard.
Sorry I can’t be at Midwinter, but I’ll be at Annual, so I’ll see you all there!