Top Tech Trends Panel Enlightens Despite Technology Troubles
Josh Hadro -- Library Journal, 7/3/2008 7:55:00 AM
- Perennial favorites open source, APIs, and mobile devices given as top trends, among others
- Technology glitches during streaming video, distracting chat room discussion during panel
- Karen Coyle: Future may not involve libraries "if we don't make some extreme changes."
Check the LJ 2008 ALA Annual Conference page for full coverage of the event
The speakers hit on dozens of topics, many noted below, though each pundit was allotted only five minutes. In addition, many panelists' participation extended beyond their speaking roles as they contributed to a chat room discussion with audience members projected beside the speakers' table, distracting more than a few in the audience from the main presentations. Another source of some technological distraction was the SightSpeed video conferencing tool that allowed Karen Coombs (Library Web Chic) and Sarah Houghton-Jan (Librarian in Black) to participate remotely, but that also made them difficult to understand due to significant choppiness in the audio and video being streamed.
Beyond open source, and anticipating bandwidth growth
Beginning the panel discussion, Marshall Breeding (Library Technology Guides) shared his thoughts on the need for a broader scale of openness, saying "there's more to openness than open source," and that open data and open APIs will be equally important in coming years. Taking up the thread of growing enthusiasm for open-source applications, Karen Schneider (Free Range Librarian) later pointed out that librarians have come full circle from the earliest days of library software, returning to writing and supporting their own code, once again "steering their own ships and driving their own destiny." Clifford Lynch (executive director of the Coalition for Networked Information) remarked on this enthusiasm as well but urged caution, pointing out that open source is no panacea, and that librarians must be careful to choose solutions based on the circumstances of the problem, not on the popularity of the solution.
Houghton-Jan arrived at a different take in her video-chat contribution, asking librarians to "look away from the bright shiny things and at ourselves instead." She was one of a number of panelists to discuss the ever-increasing demands on bandwidth, including the need for libraries to address this in their budgets and policies before bandwidth-intensive activities like streaming audio and video "clog up" the data pipes, causing user experience to suffer. Lynch and Schneider independently agreed, both relating bandwidth issues back to net neutrality and federal telecommunications policy that is "deeply wrapped in political jockeying," as Lynch put it.
Ownership of our data, and access via APIs
In describing his trends, Roy Tennant (LJ Digital Libraries blogger) suggested a conceptual framework consisting of three ages: the age of experimentation, the age game-changing surprises, and the age constant change. The age of experimentation centered on the idea that very few new technologies remain over the long term, and the discussion of game-changing surprises included mention of Google's book digitization project, which was both unprecedented and unexpected at the time of its announcement. Tennant also made vague mention of "surprises" to come from OCLC "in the next couple of years."
During his discussion of the age of constant change, Tennant spoke about the need for librarians to take ownership of data in their capacities as information professionals, urging them to become experts in extracting, analyzing, and manipulating data from their own applications and systems. "Either take complete control over the systems you rely on, or give up control completely," he said, asking librarians to remove themselves from the problematic middle ground between the two positions.
Also concerned with data and its distribution, Karen Coombs and Eric Lease Morgan (head of Digital Access and Information Architecture, Notre Dame Libraries; LITA blogger) both spoke about their vision of APIs in relation to library catalogs and other services. They argued that these APIs have an increasingly important role to play in bringing information into library services from outside bibliographic sources, as well as distributing content out and away from siloed library websites and into places like Flickr and other online media collection sites users already use for work and play. APIs can make existing library services more robust and flexible, used to display book covers from Google Book Search in OPACs, or to potentially collect and display WorldCat metadata and edition information directly in a local catalog via the forthcoming WorldCat API.
Facilitating creative content, producing it ourselves, and sending it out to mobile devices
In her top tech trends, Meredith Farkas (Information Wants To Be Free) commented on the growing importance of social software in library services to users, and the role libraries can serve in "archiving blogs as historical artifacts," preserving them against the rapid information decay already apparent in the blogosphere. She also envisioned libraries increasing their role as creative technology labs for patrons working on one-off projects, providing tools and software patrons might not be able or inclined to buy themselves.
Addressing the production quality of library services, Morgan gave one of the most contentious suggestions of the panel, asking librarians in the audience to dress their websites and services with "bling" given that "people really do judge a book by its cover." In the same vein, John Blyberg (blyberg.net) earlier spoke about libraries "not just as content providers but as content creators," competing for the attention of users who are acclimated to "a world that is very highly produced." Blyberg also focused on the broader idea that "people are beginning to develop a really personalized relationship with information" by means of portable media devices that are becoming a part of many patrons' daily lives and interactions.
Karen Coyle (Coyle’s InFormation) similarly addressed the coming ubiquity of mobile devices, saying "I want to be able to walk in the stacks and do catalog searches while I'm in there." But she lamented the fact that she has less access to bibliographic information on a mobile device located physically within a library than she might on a computer terminal located halfway around the world. She extended her concerns to include the future of bibliographic control, saying that "it is easier to get bibliographic information from Amazon and publishers than it is from libraries." This future "is going to be a giant mash-up" she said, and "if we don't make some extreme changes, it will not involve libraries."
For more news and past coverage of Top Tech Trends:
LITA Blog: Top Tech Trends
ALA Draws Crowd to Philadelphia: Top Tech Trends [Midwinter 2008] -- Library Journal, 2/15/2008
LJ Report "Washington, DC, ALA 2007": Top Tech Trends -- Library Journal, 8/15/2007
Top Tech Trends -- Tennant: Digital Libraries Blog, 6/15/2007
Top Tech Trends: Digitization, Social Networking, and the OPAC [Midwinter 2007, Seattle] -- Library Journal, 2/9/2007
Update (7/4/2008): Full audio of the Top Tech Trends panel can now be found at the LITA blog.
