The LITA Top Tech Trends panel at ALA last Sunday was a little bit hard to watch (see the news summary here). There were dozens of interesting things mentioned from some of the leading technology folks in the field, which made it all the more puzzling why I was having such a difficult time following them. I'm not the first to write about this (see Robin Hastings', Mary Carmen Chimato's, and Tom Wilson's blogs for another couple of views, among others), but here's my take:

To the left of the eight seated panelists was the text-based information flow of a chat room requiring not just plain reading comprehension, but LOL- and l33t-speak parsing as well. On the right were the two larger-than-life floating heads of the video chat e-panelists demanding our visual attention for facial recognition and expression interpretation. The live speakers themselves, dwarfed by the aggressive technology displays that flanked them, barely stood a chance in their bid for my listening comprehension.

Divided my attention falls

The competition for my attention is roughly a zero-sum game. Unfortunately, I don't (yet) have a serial connection jack into my brain, and I still basically process new information one bit at a time. I can process little supplemental info nuggets like the bubbles in VH1's Pop-Up Video because they're just that: supplemental. More importantly, they're momentary. At the Tech Trends panel, there were three constant information streams all presenting new information to me in differing formats.

I don't want to blow this out of proportion, and I still think that the inclusion of the chat and video components were excellent ideas in the abstract. They really demonstrated this LITA panel's efforts to increase participation and openness by including audience members and remote panelists in the discussion. This is a good thing. I also recognize that this extremely popular panel is an excellent way to showcase new participation methods to the hundreds of audience members, who may now hopefully go back to their own libraries and consider incorporating these tools into their tech bag of tricks. But the presentation left something to be desired.

Losing the signal for the noise

If my reaction and the reactions of those sitting around me were any indicator, the audience was suffering from, dare I say it, information overload. Every time the person on either side of me would move their head, shifting their attention from the speakers to either of the two projection screens, I was tempted to look where they were looking too, hoping that I wasn't missing something interesting. If only we could have devised among us some sort of multi-threaded distributed computing cluster to process all of the data streams, we could have worked together to take it all in. If only I had a 2 gb attention cache, I could have digested it all at my leisure. Instead, the three information modes before us acted something like sine waves out of phase, obscuring the signal for the noise.

That said, I'm not suggesting that the chat portion be scrapped, or that the panel use a speakerphone instead of the very compelling video stream that brought a human element to those panelists participating remotely. I guess I'd just like to see these technologies used more judiciously, with the distraction factor firmly in mind. Perhaps the chat could be highlighted during a question and answer portion of the panel instead of being prominently projected the whole time. Perhaps the Wizard of Oz-sized floating video heads could be un-fullscreened to a more manageable size when they're not actively speaking.

In any event, now that I've said my piece, let me move on to the contrasting delight that was the LITA presentation of the previous day.

Functional Chaos at the Social Sofware Showcase

In stark contrast to the LITA Top Tech Trends was the fun and functional chaos of the LITA BIGWIG Social Software Showcase. Though the listeners numbered an order of magnitude fewer, the room hummed with the buzz of their excitement, mounting to a near frenzy following BIGWIG chair Jason Griffey's introduction when the audience's attention was released into the wilds of small group discussions. This was the infectious frenzy of  mostly librarian associates and assistants genuinely eager to identify new ideas, wrap their brains around the source code, and carry it home with them to bolster their own library's services. This was a beautiful thing.

In the breakout sessions LITA librarians held court at round tables throughout the room and on any floor space available. Each presided over a different topic, ranging from mobile applications and video services to APIs and social software sites like Facebook and Open Social.

Information a la carte

In that room, eight simultaneous conversations didn't distract from one another because I wasn't being asked to mind them all at once. There were a lot of disparate technologies happening here as well, and a lot to be distracted by, but these factors were simply outweighed by the engrossing personal elements of each presentation. My undivided attention was on Jason Griffey, head of Library Information Technology at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, as he discussed Video 2.0 and the New Media Revolution. I watched as he practiced what he preached, demonstrating a multitude of online tools playing into the distribution of content authority and authorship, all the while recording and live-streaming everything being said.

I got a chance to speak one-on-one with Melinda Gottesman, reference librarian at the University of Central Florida, about the wizardry of APIs and how she uses them to improve her library's OPAC. She told me about the functionality she's working to add to her school's catalog, which will allow users to send item call numbers to their cell phones via text message, obviating the need for very small pieces of paper and dull orange pencils, or wasteful printouts. I listened to Cindi Trainor explain LibGuides to dozens of people over the course of this un-panel, describing the functionality that this content management systems offers which allows librarians to easily embed content and media where patrons can find it.

And even with all this, I barely scratched the surface of the Social Software Showcase. I found it impossible to take in all the ideas being offered to me, but the session never made a promise toward that end in the first place. This session offered information a la carte, with audience members guided only by their own curiosity and interests. Fortunately, everything I didn't get to is readily available on the BIGWIG blog for me to digest at my own pace, along with links to even more virtual discussion.

Now, I'm relatively sure that the Social Software Showcase format wouldn't scale well to serve an audience the size of that for the Top Tech Trends panel, which numbered in the hundreds. But my experience with both panels leaves me hoping for a little bit less from the Top Tech Trends panel, and a whole lot more from the Social Software Showcases to come. Then maybe we can all pay the attention due to each and every one of these exciting technologies on display at ALA.