Top Technology Trends

Top trends in translation

LITA top trends

[Note: I keep editing this on shuttle buses–hotel room does not have chair, back is killing me, and related issues. But still…]

7th floor historic tower of Hotel Inter-Continental

Just little late this time—like 5 minutes while searching for Grand Ballroom. 7th floor not intuitive. Not as grand as Hilton grand ballroom (or GB in conference parlance—very heavy on acronyms—librarianese). But very nice for a wedding. No chairs left, so sat on balcony floor. Two other bloggers in site. Amend—nine laptops in sight and one person really fast on a PDA of some type. And that’s just what boyfriend and I can see on the balcony.

[Kind of interesting to compare what I heard to what had been posted in advance on LITA blog…they changed some, and I heard different emphasis. It makes the value of attending ALA clearer. I have been trying desperately not to read other’s takes. Not that I think it would be pollution, per se. But I’m trying to report what I heard, FWIW.]

Missed intro.
First speaker Tom Wilson

Digital preservation issues

Andrew Pace
The OPAC sucks.
Dis-integrated library systems. Aside—vision of crumbling bits, servers, wire spaghetti.
Four stools—start doing simple things well.
1.Working with vendor for new discovery tool for catalog
2. Electronic Resource Management—take Electectronic Resources and serials out; make access better, make OPAC better
3.Digital repositories—horizon of basements rather than silos, tunneling.
4.Metasearch.
Next challenge for ILS—managing the context of the user. Maybe systems or even standards.

Roy Tennant
Open URL NISO standards.
1. Web services to build tunnels between basements
AJAX suites—vs. web 1.0. Web 2.0 takes data streams i.e., Google maps of Chicago crime statistics.
2. silo systems suck.. librarians demanding systems expose date—apis,
3. Organizations getting into our business. Cough-gle. Can’t let it distract us. Google Library may dampen library digitization efforts. Scope and scale may bring copyright down upon us all.

Karen G. Schneider

1. ILS sucking. ILS=Citation database—metadata w/o architect like canary without song
2. Gates study—wifi not being planned by 60% of public (?) libraries?
3. Info is becoming conversation more and more.

Citadel networking. The wifi at ALA—different authenticating process in every other building. (Sucks!)

Laptop sales exceeded desktops last year.
Big peeve—bewildering Digital Rights Management stuff. Look at Overdrive: un-readable via Treo.
IM vs. expensive fat clients. (cite Sarah Houghton)

Eric Morgan

Says he is nervous.
1. Massive cpus/usbs. Going to get huge-er. Can save lots.
2. Live cds (may have term wrong). Bootable. Can use operating system and environment of choice and carry it around on key fob. Renders privacy into non-issue.
3. Web services. XML screens of data.
4. Commercial and noncommercial info side by side. Open source next to commercial—we have to play with both.
5. Preservation of digital materials.
6. Decreasing people coming to your web site or physical location. XUL for Mozilla—get your stuff in their space.
7. Customization not going away. Doesn’t depend on personalization. Pre- and post- filtering information. Evaluation.

Marshall Breeding

Suddenly changed business landscape. Sirsi and Dynix. Business decisions have a big effect on us.

Enterprise systems; silos, going away. Lib auto needs to get in enterprise system mindset. Global enterprise—google, yahoo part of that—web services as way to expose lib. Data.

Wireless proliferation. Security & tech issues—being resolved.
Limitations being overcome.

Milton Wolf

Abe L—future comes up one day at a time. Joke about multithile driving.

Boomers—won’t retire passively—want involvement. Library host more older adults than senior citizens. Coming to tech—fastest growing segment is 85+

Adaptive tech? Intergenerational tutoring?ADULTS ARE community minded. They can take us where we want to go.

Joan Frye Williams

Mass collaboration—wikis, Howard Dean, Craig’s List. Virtual markets. Attract large numbers. Interact directly. People love it. The network is becoming the locus of innovation.

The network is the new home of trust. Command and control is no longer the trust structure. Peers trust each other—trust trickles up. We need to allow users to add information. Personalization. Good peer recommendations.

Do less & get more if we harness power of patrons.

Clifford Lynch

1. Data curation. “The Data Deluge” article. Data scientists—connection to LIS world.
2. Migration from creation to manipulation—digital photography and related technology creating data sets. Manipulatable (wc? On an never before imagined level.
3. text corpora (sp.?) Enormous—text mining, indexing, computable. Will change scholarship and science. Plagiasphere? Turnitin kind of stuff. Where does it end?
4. Michelangelo David project—high end data sets. How do we protect high-resolution data sets from being exploited? 500 year old object! Controlling access to things well outside copyright. Libraries have used many two-dimensional copy technologies. What about 3-d?

Q&A:

Q: Journalist from some LIS pub looking for content? Submissions? Wordy.
Q: Folksonomies? Clifford Lynch—not really new. He’s uneasy. Distributed computing environment. Karen Schneider–Civilians (non-librarians) think they have invented metadata. Wait until they discover authority control. [Laughter.] Q: Influence of blogosphere exaggerated. Using for economic or political gain. Less enthusiastic. Joan says she didn’t say blogs would replace other information sources. Thinks engagement with participation can enhance our whuffie (well, that wasn’t her word, ok?)
Tom—still our job to teach people evaluation.
Q: Eli Edwards (! almost fell off balcony trying to identify)—municipal wifi. No User Left Behind. Missed response—sorry!
Q: GIS services—link to ILS? Clifford Lynch —geo-referencing big. Some difficulties. Ripe for being used more broadly. Andrew Pace—geospatial study of libraries—middle shelf most popular. Better OPACs, less browsing.