This is a list of top technology trends in libraries my very small and cloudy crystal ball shows to me. The increasing availability of Voice of over IP (VoIP) is making it easier to communicate with people all over the world in real time. Email is nice, and it has a number of advantages over the use of telephones. For example, because email is essentially a form of the written word, it allows you to communicate with many people across great distances of time and space. It is good for sharing detailed information. It is of sort of permanent because it is fixed in writing. On the other hand, real time voice communication can often be more efficient and communication things through tonal inflections that get lost in writing. With the increasing availability of VoIP technology (such as through the use of Skype) we might see increasing collaboration across nations…
Category: Top Technology Trends
Top Tech Trends: The Trends
Sunday, January 22, 8am-10am, Marriott Rivercenter, Conference Room 3/4 (This runs a bit long, so it’s been broken into two parts: the business meeting dealing with the TTT events and the Top Technology Trends discussion.) With a little bit of time left after the business meeting, the discussion moved to the juicer topic: Top Technology Trends. Here’s a quick overview of what was discussed: 1. It’s nice to experiment with high tech, but low tech can be good, too. Simple answers are good. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel. (Okay, that really came from the discussion of the event, but it played into some of the TTT discussion as well.) 2. Is the promise of FRBR going to flesh out? Are we going to start seeing it for our libraries soon? The discussion pointed out that FRBR assumes that records have been prepared for FRBR. OCLC does have an…
Top Tech Trends: The Business End
Sunday, January 22, 8am-10am, Marriott Rivercenter, Conference Room 3/4 (This runs a bit long, so it’s been broken into two parts: the business meeting dealing with the TTT events and the Top Technology Trends discussion.) The agenda for the Top Tech Trends meeting this midwinter was “more of a traditional business meeting than a discussion of trends.†The Top Tech Trends committee members and experts (or “Trendsters” as they came to be called) discussed the exciting increase in participation in the TTT events over the last few years, and evaluated how to make sure these events don’t lose due to their size. Karen Schneider posted some of her take-away points from the meeting, and I’m doing the same here. Top Technology Trends events (for those, like me, who haven’t been able to make them) have centered around experts who identify some trends to examine, discuss, and then they open the…
Sarah Houghton’s Top Technology Trends
I am unable to attend ALA Midwinter again this year, but here are my top technology trends. Someone can read them in a big booming voice so it will sound impressive 😉 IM reference goes mainstream After reading the existing studies showing that co-browsing is of limited value in many chat reference situations and thinking about how much money they’re spending on their web-based chat products, libraries will begin to re-think how they offer live online reference to their users. More and more libraries (as has been the trend for the last year) will adopt instant messaging for online reference, either in addition to or as a replacement for their existing expensive and bloated web-based chat products. A year ago I and a few others were called shortsighted and sometimes even “stupid†for pointing out the negatives of web-based chat. We were also called “extremist†and “too youth-oriented†for promoting…
TTT with the Experts – Meeting Agenda
This year at Midwinter, the TTT morning meeting with the experts will be more of a traditional business meeting than a discussion of trends.
Library services and in-house software development
This essay outlines two opportunities for the library profession: 1) the increased need for library services and not necessarily library collections, and 2) the ability to be leaders in the implementation of services through in-house software development.
Thomas Dowling's Trends For Midwinter 2006
Ramblings and Meanderings, January 13, 2006 All Library 2.0., All The Time It’s the best buzzword since “Web-Enabled”, even if (or because) no two people really agree on what it means. In general, it’s a Good Thing to make better online Library services that talk that make smarter use of technology, and give more power to the user. It’s a Good Thing for libraries to take greater ownership in the services they provide. It can even be a good thing to put a fancy label on the project. That said, the actual trend for a while will be more about discussing and defining Library 2.0, rather than wholesale adoption of new services. Early Adopters of Library Catalog 2.0 I did say wholesale adoption above, right? There are more than a few toes testing the waters of fairly radical reworkings of the service formerly known as the OPAC. As I write…
technical skills of librarianship
This short essay outlines five technology skills necessary for systems work in libraries
Andrew Pace's Top Tech Trends
My love of mixed metaphors almost made me not want to set the record straight…
Reflecting On Trends
There have been so many great posts on this already, I am going to sort of skip the major summaries and get right to some reflections. I was surprised by the panel’s consensus that ILS and OPACs “suckâ€. I have long thought so, but it is not often that you get librarians stating that our main interface with which we greet the public is lacking is basic usability features. Maybe others have said it before, but it was the first time I had heard it so adamantly. What I heard overwhelmingly was that, as a business, libraries need to evaluate “disruptive†technologies and find ways to harness them for good. Many librarians see what we do as service rather than business, but I would argue that we do both. I think we need to take some queues from some other information businesses, Google anyone?, and re-evaluate how we present information…