Category: 2007

You should really listen to the podcasts. There are things I won’t be able to do in words. Like give you the experience of Karen Schneider singing her recruiting song. Or summarize Clifford Lynch (can anyone do that?). So, for the time-pressed, here is a summary of the Top Tech Trends discussion at ALA Midwinter, in the fabulous Spanish Ballroom of the Fairmont Olympic in Seattle. Present were: Jennifer Ward (the committee chair), Maurice York, Clifford Lynch, Marshall Breeding, and Karen Schneider. Absent speakers were: Roy Tennant, Sarah Houghton-Jan, Eric Lease-Morgan, and Thomas Dowling. There was much discussion of possible alternatives to the traditional OPAC. Tennant and Houghton-Jan mentioned OCLC and some version of Worldcat as a potential OPAC for consortia. Schneider questioned the assumption that our primary finding aid should be a locally tweaked dataset, and Breeding commented that the trend is toward national or international aggregations of that…

When: Monday Jan. 22, 2007 The scene: Around 60-70 people attended this IG on the final day of the ’07 Midwinter conference. It was standing room only, which of course meant that several sat on the floor. The discussion was wide-ranging, with Joe Ford, of Joseph Ford & Associates, presiding as incoming chair. The primary role of the Emerging Technologies IG at Midwinter is to program the summer session as close to the bleeding edge as possible, and to that end, nearly everyone attending had suggestions on what they would like to see this coming June in Washington D.C. With very little coaxing, the group took off on a free-wheeling discussion, talking about what emerging technologies most interest or concern them. Several themes quickly emerged: the implications of widely available broadband, large amounts of personal storage capacity, the effects of widely social information consumption, as well as the legal and…

Tech Trends, Midwinter 2007 One area that was greatly discussed during the two hour exchange was the ILS. Trendsters discussed open source, convergence of vendors and the fact that these are no longer boot strapped companies but ones that private investors think have value. The top technology trend that are and will continue to have a great impact on library services are enterprise ILS services, outsourced services, green / sustainable building design including heat source pumps, RFID, gaming, and techno mobile vans .The recognition of “the library as place” and the need to recognize new sets of services is having the greatest impact on librarians. Librarians need to learn that their services are both virtual and place-centered. They need a forum with experts who can share trends that are changing services. For example, there is a product called Goldfire. This is an innovation platform that indexes everything. As a matter…