LITA Top Technology Trends

These are my notes from the Top Technology Trends session my few comments will be in italics so you know these are my thoughts not those of the speakers.
Sarah Houghton (in absentia)

1. Returning power over content to content owner and know it directly.
2. OCLC ILS – merger with RLG, OpenWorldCat, Red Light Green, solve the wealth of ILS disatisfaction
3. Online outreach – Web presence as a true branch, make libraries more findable.

See LITA Blog for more info

Andrew Pace

1. Greater findability. Our OPAC doesn’t suck anymore. Endeca is a small part of the long terms solutions. Commodity status of faceted browsing, relevance ranking. Struggle at what level we should aggregator content.
2. Automatic classification, subject assignment, and natural language entry points.
3. We are no longer of the landlords of the information space.

Marshall Breeding

1. Rush for next gen library interfaces. Everyone is trying to build interface that at least people don’t HATE. Many experiments in next gen librarian interface. Who knows what will win, what will work. Lots of interim solutions out there.
2. ILS Industry still more consolidation to come. Companies are out sourcing development and building partnerships. Fewer number stronger companies. Better product. Create new business opportunities. Increase problems with integration of these diverse productsion. Interoperabality. Web Services as the ideal, but not adopted yet.

Clifford Lynch

1. Recent development in networking, Internet2 backbone to be replaced in the next year. Mixed optical and IP network. Create high bandwidths as needed 80 to 800GB of bandwidth possible. Distributed storage and highly redundant storage.
2. Net-neutrality – Chance that the internet turns into cable television. Rocketboom
3. Data curation – Importance of data maintainance in terms of scholarship. National Science Foundation. Cyberstructure. Institution repositories and discipline repositories. ILS vendors offering repositories as an add on to ILS.
4. High adoption of sharing sites – See confusion about whether these sites are for sharing or preservation.
5. Computational use of literatures – Large collections of text digitized and objects of computation

Karen Schneider – See more on the LITA Blog

1. OPAC does continue to suck but librarians are biting back. Focus on findability is very healthy. Part of greater recognition of we really need to serve the user well. The user is not broken! OPAC is not the center of the library universe.
2. Managed Open Source – The open source commitment can be tough if you don’t have the resources in house to maintain. Companies that make it their business to provide open source software support.
3. Porousity of privacy continue to be interesting. What people put into MySpace, Facebook, Flickr
4. Faceted navigation in search. Does a great job of marrying search and browse. People coming to the catalog with full text expectation in a metadata universe.
5. Ebooks – Sophie, Institute for the Future of the Book.
6. Graphic Novel taken more seriously

Eric Lease Morgan – See more on the LITA Blog

1. Increasing availability of VoIP is going to enable people to communicate all over the world.
2. Web pages in the form of blogs and wikis are becoming the norm rather than the exception. Preservation issues with this because of the fact that the content lives in a database.
3. Social Networking sites – ways to communicate and exploring oneself online
4. Idea and principles of open sources software are percolating into other areas and influencing other areas
5. Metasearch is not living up to expectations. Relevance ranking, different metadata, deduplication issues
6. Mass digitization changes the role of libraries greatly. Everyone is going to have content.
7. License content and schemes are not going away. Open access will live side by side.
8. Growing discontent with library catalogs. Services againist the thing (evaluate, summarize, compare contrast, make citations, discuss, etc)

Tom Wilson

1. Everything we do is an interim solution. The phrases we use reflect what we are thinking. Need to stop looking at a single thing as “the solution” but rather as one step along in the process. Need to look at things as if we are experimenting. Tied into making things “perfect” before we make them available to our constituencies.
2. Stop looking at systems we provide access to as monolithic and unchangeable.

Roy Tennant

1. Next generation finding tools – Gaze should not rest solely on the catalog, because our users are looking for information from a variety to information services. Very difficult to do. Ex Libris’ Primo Innovative’s Encore.
2. Rise of filtering and selection – Very important these days! Publishing completely transformed by the breakdown of barriers to publication. Everyone can be a publisher (double-edge sword). Users are going to increasingly value filtering and selection.
3. Rise of microcommunities – Those with really arcane interests can find each other, connect and communicate. How to serve microcommunities well? Geographic barriers dropping.

Questions for the Panel

Desktop Search -

Morgan – Being able to pull things down from the library and put it with your other things and be able to index this.

Lynch – Stuff I see. Products that go beyond “documents” and focus on your interactions with information over time.

Tagging in the Catalog / Folksonomies and User Marked up Catalog

Breeding – Takes a critical mass to get users to have an impact. On the individual library level tagging may not get the individual mass necessary.

Schneider – Reviewing hasn’t caught on in the library world because it doesn’t work right. People put their reviews in for a reason.

If reviewing systems worked well people would use them. (I don’t agree with this. People are used to tagging and reviewing certain places and we would be foolish to force them to change what they are doing. People tag where they tag and they tag for different reasons. For example I use LibraryThing as a record of both what I want to read and what I’ve read. Libraries won’t keep track of this for people because of privacy concerns so the kind of tagging I do in LibraryThing I’d never do in the catalog.)

Pace – The promise is to get this data somewhere else! We should be getting the reviews where they already exist. (Some possibilities Library Thing, Amazon)

Wilson – Have created a very controlled environment for our catalog and as a result people are not adjusting easily to using that same tool and environment to do this.

What will people to using to get at them stuff in the future?

Wilson – There isn’t going to be one thing that people use to access stuff.

Lynch – Portable media in quantity has been a steady growing trend. People like the idea to carry stuff (music, media, movies) to get on demand. Startling how textual materials have lagged in this world. Interesting and confusing pricing model. Difference in cost between media on phone and other devices. Finally seeing roll out in US of high speed package technologies. Everyone is learning as they go along in this process. Google may make available an open source OCR system.

Where do you see going on with mass digitization and the ramifications of these projects?

Open Content Alliance (Yahoo, Microsoft) and Google

Pace – We can digitize technically 30 million books faster than we can circulate 30 million books.

Breeding – Digitizing the text is the easy part. Legal issue are much larger. Search issues are bigger.

Lynch – How long digitization takes is directly related to money spent. Legal issues can slow down the process indefinately. Very different to search full text of books versus articles. Need different systems for dealing with these objects. We don’t have experience with dealing with this.

Tennant – What do you have when you digitize all these books? Lots of issues with Google Books. Not all books are open. Navigating through the books is difficult as well. Providing a really useful interface for this is daunting.

What about RFID ? What are the implications of implementing RFID?

Morgan – As a profession we take privacy more seriously than the rest of the people. If you give people a ittle bit of convience then they will give up their privacy in a heartbeat. Are libraries the guardians of individual privacy? I’d say no!

Crawford – Librarians should be more aware of privacy than everyone else. We should protect patron privacy. We should make people aware of what they are giving.

Lynch – This is a lot more pervasive than libraries. Commercial sectors and indentification. Important to not look at RFID in isolation in terms of security and privacy.

Pace – This privacy issues is part of a larger question of what kind of country do we want to live in?

Tennant – It is important to protect people’s privacy. With RFID there are ways to do this. RFID is also a financial question. It is not a trivial investment.

Schneider – We need to be careful about the privacy issue and we need to think about it. We need to think about the return on investment question. How is this going to work with resource sharing? Everyone have their own RFIDs.

What is the role of the library in the social networking space?

Morgan – We need to get into the users space. We need to syndicate our content.

Schneider – Virtual marketing is important.