Because the connectivity was so good this year for Top Tech Trends at ALA Midwinter 2009, we were able to use Ustream to live stream the video. That also means that it’s archived by Ustream, and embeddable….so here it is! The entire Top Tech video, to watch at your leisure! We’ll also have an audio-only download/Podcast coming in the next few days, for those that want to listen on the go. If you have other suggestions for where this should be posted, or if you embed the video somewhere, let us know!
Category: Top Technology Trends
Top Tech Trends from Karen Coombs
Its Top Tech Trend time again. Every time I’m asked to come up with trends I sort of get a pit in the bottom of my stomach. How to choose trends? Should I choose tech things that have changed they way I think about technology this year? How specific or narrow should my trends me? How accessible to non-techies Also, I worry about getting a diversity of opinions and people feeling they the trends the trendsters put forward are too general or obvious. Picking trend is hard for all these reasons, plus you don’t want to pick something that turns out to not really be a trend. So, this time I’m categorizing my trends a bit. My personal A-HA trend Web applications which are extremely flexible, versatile and extendable. For me the app that has typified this in my work this year is Drupal. Drupal is a veritable swiss army…
Top Tech Trends from Sarah Houghton-Jan
I’m not able to be there at the session, but I’m sharing my top trends below. Please add your own thoughts in the comments section. Discussions often bring out the best in all of us! The Art of Web Presence Maintenance With libraries extending their web presences out beyond the borders of their own websites proper, the coordination and successful maintenance of these presences has become a skill in its own right. How to successfully leverage a Facebook page for your library? How to successfully use Wikipedia to promote your library’s services? On which sites should you be present? How to successfully use YouTube for library videocasts? The list goes on and on. The skills include the ability to creatively manage your different presences, updating them when appropriate, keeping information current, participating in new sites when warranted, and deleting outdated presences. More libraries are designating people other than their traditional…
Top Tech Trends LiveBlog
Join the live blog of Top Tech Trends on Sunday, 8am-10am (MST). Follow the conversation, post questions and comments, and view multimedia content of the session.
Top Tech in Denver: Let the Trends come to you
Our semi-annual gathering of trendsters to converse about the leading technologies and tech topics of the day will take place in Denver in just over a week. This year we’re blowing the doors off of Top Tech so that you can follow the conversation and participate in the discussion from anywhere–California, Maine, Florida, or even from another conference session in Denver.
Eric Lease Morgan's Top Tech Trends for ALA Mid-Winter, 2009
This is a list of “top technology trends” written for ALA Mid-Winter, 2009. They are presented in no particular order. Indexing with Solr/Lucene works well – Lucene seems to have become the gold standard when it comes to open source indexer/search engine platforms. Solr — a Web Services interface to Lucene — is increasingly the preferred way to read & write Lucene indexes. Librarians love to create lists. Books. Journals. Articles. Movies. Authoritative names and subjects. Websites. Etc. All of these lists beg for the organization. Thus, (relational) databases. But Lists need to be short, easily sortable, and/or searchable in order to be useful as finding aids. Indexers make things searchable, not databases. The library profession needs to get its head around the creation of indexes. The Solr/Lucene combination is a good place to start — er, catch up. Linked data is a new name for the Semantic Web –…
Top Tech Trends 2008
Thanks to the efforts of all involved, we were able to get a very clean soundboard recording of this year’s Top Tech Trends program. Hope that everyone enjoys the recording, and comment and let us know what you think! Without feedback, we can’t tell if you like it or hate it. 🙂
Virtual Karen's Top Tech Trends
Sarah Houghton-Jan (see her summary and trends) and I participated in Top Tech Trends virtually this past Sunday. It was a blast. I had a little easier time hearing than Sarah, although hearing myself speak was slightly disconcerting. I really enjoyed talking with people in the back channel Meebo chat room. Though some people pointed out that that was distracting from the panelist present in person. APIs Galore Let’s be realistic APIs have hit their stride on the web at large. In libraries they are starting to come into their own as well. However, our focus in libraries has thus far been on bibliographic data. This isn’t the only data of value out there. Libraries need to think about how to use APIs to get digital objects like photos and videos in and out of web-based media service providers like Flickr and Blip.tv . If we do this we will…
Top Technology Trends from Sarah Houghton-Jan, ALA 2008
I had a lovely time presenting virtually, despite the sound issues on all ends. It still was a rather successful demonstration of virtual participation, and I think that was wonderful. Big thanks to Maurice York for organizing this for myself and Karen. I have 5 Trends I’d like to throw out there. I was able to cover three of them (#s 1-3) in the live presentation, but apparently the echo in the room made parts of what I said difficult to hear. So, here’s what I said verbatim, near as I can remember (plus the bonuses of #s 4 and 5). Let’s hit it. #1: Bandwidth Every library complains about bandwidth. Many people have faster access at home than at the library, which is a reversal of what we used to see when people came into the library to use our connections. The problem is multimedia, which is wonderful, but…
Top Tech Trends for ALA (Summer '08)
Here is a non-exhaustive list of Top Technology Trends for the American Library Association Annual Meeting (Summer, 2008). These Trends represent general directions regarding computing in libraries — short-term future directions where, from my perspective, things are or could be going. They are listed in no priority order. “Bling” in your website – I hate to admit it, but it seems increasingly necessary to make sure your institution’s website be aesthetically appealing. This might seem obvious to you, but considering the fact we all think “content is king” we might have to reconsider. Whether we like it or not, people do judge a book by its cover, and people do judge other’s on their appearance. Websites aren’t very much different. While librarians are great at organizing information bibliographically, we stink when it comes to organizing things visually. Think graphic design. Break down and hire a graphic designer, and temper their…