In yet another crowded ballroom, the men (and woman) of LITA prognosticated on the future of libraries and technology.
Walt Crawford moderated the panel and spoke in absentia for Sarah Houghton. Her trends were:
- Returning power to content owners
- An OCLC ILS with RedLightGreen as the front-end
- Outreach online
Karen Schneider listed four:
- Faceted Navigation, from Endeca and others
- eBooks–the Sophie project from the Institute for the Future of the Book
- The Graphic Novel–Fun House
- Net Neutrality
Eric Lease Morgan listed several, and issued a call for a Notre Dame Perl programmer throughout his trends:
- VoIP, which he thought would cure email abuse
- Web pages are now blogs and wikis, which may cause preservation issues since they are dynamically generated from a database
- Social Networking tools
- Open Source
- Metasearch, which he thought may be dead given its lack of de-duplication
- Mass Digitization, and the future services libraries can provide against it
- Growing Discontent with Library Catalogs
- Cataloging is moving to good enough instead of complete
- OCLC is continuing to expand and refine itself
- LITA 40 year anniversary–Morgan mentioned how CBS is just celebrating their 55th anniversary of live color TV broadcasting
Tom Wilson noted two things: “Systems aren’t monolithic, and everything is an interim solution.”
Roy Tennant listed three trends:
Next generation finding tools, not just library catalogs. Though the NGC4Lib mailing list is a necessary step, metasearch still needs to be done, and it’s very difficult to do. Some vendors are introducing products like Innovative’s Encore and Ex Libris’ Primo which attempt to solve this problem.
The rise of filtering and selection. Tennant said, “The good news is everyone can be a publisher. And the bad news is, Everyone can be a publisher.”
Rise of microcommunities, like code4lib, which give rise to ubiquitious and constant communication.
Discussion after the panelists spoke raised interesting questions, including Clifford Lynch’s recommendation of Microsoft’s Stuff I’ve Seen. Marshall Breeding recommended tagging WorldCat, not local catalogs, but Karen Schneider pointed out that the user reviews on Open World Cat were deficient compared to Amazon.
When asked how to spot trends, Eric Lease Morgan responded, “Read and read and read–listservs, weblogs; Listen; Participate.” Roy Tennant said, “Look outside the library literature–Read the Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, and Business 2.0. Finally, look for patterns.”
More discussion, and better summaries:
LITA Blog » Blog Archive » Eric Lease Morgan’s Top Tech Trends for ALA 2006; Sum pontifications
LITA Blog » Blog Archive » The Annual Top 10 Trends Extravaganza
Hidden Peanuts » ALA 2006 – LITA Top Tech Trends
ALA TechSource | Tracking the Trends: LITA’s ALA Annual ’06 Session
Library Web Chic » Blog Archive » LITA Top Technology Trends