ALA 2010 Midwinter Meeting: Top Tech Trends Panel Focuses on End Users and Ebooks

ALA 2010 Midwinter Meeting - American Library Association - Library Journal

By Josh Hadro -- Library Journal, 1/19/2010

• Panel led by first-time panel participants with new focus
• Hot topic: mobile devices, and rising patron expectations
• Books being reinvented by software and hardware

In a Top Tech Trends (TTT) session January 17 that took a somewhat different approach featuring younger, first-time participants, five panelists focused primarily on more popular trends affecting patron access and services rather than on backroom library workflows or broad concepts like software architecture and technology infrastructure.

The panel at the American Library Association (ALA) Midwinter Meeting, sponsored by the Library and Information Technology Association (LITA), consisted of five academic librarians:

• Amanda Etches-Johnson, user experience librarian at McMaster University
• Jason Griffey, head of library information technology at University of Tennessee, Chattanooga
• Joe Murphy, science librarian, Yale University
• Lauren Pressley, instructional design librarian, Wake Forest University
• David Walker, web services librarian, California State University System

Gregg Silvis, assistant director for library computing systems at the University of Delaware Library and TTT committee chair, served as panel moderator and introduced the format: first, each trendster identified one or more topics of individual interest, followed by a round-robin portion dedicated to a more in-depth discussion regarding the future of the book.

Discovery trends
Walker laid out the first trend, describing the recent explosion of discovery systems featuring aggregate indexes of subscription and local content. He citied Summon from Serials Solutions, Primo from Ex Libris, OCLC's WorldCat Local, and the EBSCO Discovery Service.

He described these systems as the logical next step after federated search—though he noted that most of the vendors are still marketing federated search products—and pointed to the inevitable "arms race" among vendors of these systems to boast the greatest amount of discoverable content.

User experience
Next, Etches-Johnson urged the audience to consider the concept of "user experience" (UX) as new technology-driven services are designed. "In the library world, it's still pretty fresh to our ears," she said of UX design talk, but stressed the importance of considering the entirety of a user's interactions with a library, whether online or in person.

(For more on UX, see LJ's new column "The User Experience," by Aaron Schmidt, co-founder with Etches-Johnson of library user experience consultancy Influx).

Etches-Johnson also linked good design to a consistency of experience across full-browser sites and pared-down mobile interfaces. "What we do for mobile devices is really going to impact what we do in the coming year," she added.

Still, she later conceded that her own institution and others have not yet chosen to dedicate staff effort specifically to mobile design, given the low (single-digit) percentage of overall traffic most libraries have reported.

Persistent refrain: mobile
Murphy started out describing "the near universal adoption of mobile technology," pointing out that libraries must be prepared for the inevitable change of patron expectations as they accomplish in an increasing number of daily tasks on mobile devices.

Librarians also must watch and embrace mobile-based gaming and geolocation, he said. (These, however, are mainly limited as of now to smartphones, with only a fraction of the penetration that the broad category of mobile technology has achieved.)

Twitter, he added, is no longer an emerging tool, but rather a standard around which services are now built.

Murphy also offered the somewhat contentious statement that "the only time print is relevant is when it's not yet available digitally," though others have interpreted this comment as reflecting his position as an academic librarian.

He concluded that librarians are charged with transferring their skills and abilities to new mobile service areas, such as SMS (text message) reference.

Augmented reality
Augmented reality—"the combination of the real and virtual… in real time and in a 3-D nature"—was Pressley's pick. Citing the recent 2010 Horizon Report on emerging technologies on college and university campuses, she agreed that augmented reality apps are poised to have a major educational impact over the next two to three years.

She offered examples, including the highlighted puck in broadcast hockey; a real-estate app that can show pricing information about houses while walking or driving through a neighborhood; and Layar, an application that allows third parties to create collections of location-linked content to be displayed via the camera output of certain mobile devices.

The library at North Carolina State University, she said, is working on an augmented reality app known as Wolfwalk, which links information about buildings and services to geographic coordinates on campus.

Commenting on this trend, Griffey agreed that augmented reality presented an unparalleled "opportunity to leverage the unique stuff [libraries] own." Adding to this, Walker mused over the opportunity augmented reality offers to collocate ebooks with print, using a camera overlay to expose items on both real and virtual shelves.

End of apps, new code
Finally, Griffey used his comment period to make perhaps the most aggressive prediction of the morning. Since July 2008, the Apple iTunes App store has served up more than three billion downloads, he said, and now features some 134,000 applications.

Still, Griffey countered, "2010 is the year that the app dies." 

Despite the trend toward platform-specific mobile downloads, Griffey believes the coming adoption of HTML 5 and CSS 3 will instead jumpstart development of mobile-optimized web portals. HTML 5 includes native support for local storage, drag and drop functionality, and embedded audio and video tags, he said, all of which will make for more robust standards-based web development.

If developers can leverage a single well-designed service to serve both browser-based and mobile users, they stand to cut down on duplicated efforts.

Reinvention of the book
Silvis introduced the second portion of the discussion group by holding up a Rocket ereader, circa 1998, along with a late-model Kindle. "They are frighteningly similar," he joked, and then asked each panelist to weigh in on what relevance recent ereading technology and platforms advances will have on the "reinvention of the book."

Griffey added another death-watch to his list of trends. "[Ebook] hardware is dying," he declared (though if the recent spate of ereaders debuted at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas is any indication, more companies than ever are hoping Griffey's call proves premature).

Griffey instead sees the future of reading in software platforms; he described Blio and Copia, a software ereader to share work among multiple devices and a social reading platform respectively, as two promising paths forward. (See LJ's coverage on these product launches.)

Murphy agreed, adding that he believed libraries should steer clear of the hardware game: "I don't see ereading devices having any place in libraries—the focus should be on content," he said. Pressley lamented the increasing shift away from content ownership toward more restrictive license agreements. (For more on these concerns and others, see Tom Peters' Ereader Bill of Rights.)

Etches-Johnson mentioned the Vook as an experiment in mixing text and video, though also urged caution that embedded multimedia can raise accessibility issues. Finally, for academic libraries, Walker saw the trend toward equitable digital content access as a means of achieving a needed "parity between ebooks and journals."

See the LITA Blog for video and audio of the session as well as the collection of tweets and comments for a summary of the community discussion about these top tech trends.

Past Top Tech Trends sessions:

ALA Conference 2009: Top Provocative Tech Trends—ALA Annual 2009
LITA and Top Tech Trends, Part 1: Panel Ranges Far and Wide Over Library Tech Issues—ALA Midwinter 2009
Top Tech Trends Panel Enlightens Despite Technology Troubles—ALA Annual 2008
ALA Draws Crowd to Philadelphia: Top Tech Trends—ALA Midwinter 2008
LJ Report "Washington, DC, ALA 2007": Top Tech Trends—ALA Annual 2007
Top Tech Trends: Digitization, Social Networking, and the OPAC—Midwinter 2007