TTT Reflections
Participating in Top Tech Trends this morning was a blast. The best part was the interaction between the trendsters. Also, the tech finally, finally, was awesome. Good wireless signal, so that Jason Griffey was able to uStream the session. There was also live blogging using CoverItLive, which was pretty cool. And folks participating remotely thought it was cool too as evidenced by the comment
Between ustream and the liveblog it is really just like being there. We need more of this at conferences. LITA rocks. – JanieH
Some of my personal take aways from the session?
- Clifford Lynch said that “the way in which people are interacting with displays is starting to change” and we took a head count of who in the room used multiple monitors. I’d say it was at least 85%.
- Karen Coyle said that “lots of good enough is winning out over small amounts of perfect”. While I agree that this is happening, I’m not sure how I feel about it. We need to be careful how we judge what is good enough particular when we make technology decisions that have long term ramifications. We don’t want a good enough solution that doesn’t allow for flexibility and a reasonable exit strategy.
- Clifford Lynch also talked about in tough economic times being able to produced evidence based information about returns on technology investments. Whether that be improvements or turn around time, quality of service or whatever.
Afterward, a couple I talked to people commented that my trends and comments were the most practical and reasonable. I suppose that this is an accurate assessment given that I’m almost always grounding what I say in real world examples. I gave several directly related to my current workplace. However, the fact the some observers find me the most practical and reasonable is somewhat ironic to me given that my ideas are often seen as “on the fringe” at my place of work. But I think is some ways it is all a matter of context and perspective. Different libraries are in different places and as a result are open or not to very specific set of ideas.
Overall, high praise to the TTT panel and committee/team. It was great and we even managed to make it through the fire alarm mayhem!
“We don’t want a good enough solution that doesn’t allow for flexibility and a reasonable exit strategy.”
I’m a frim believer in ‘good enough’, but this is a very good point. “Good enough” doesn’t mean that just anything is good enough. Only solution that are in fact good enough are, well, good enough.
Some of the criteria to determine whether a solution is indeed ‘good enough’ are not just about the immediate user experience, but about whether the solution is flexible enough for future extensibility (even in unforeseen ways), and, where possible, how reasonable the potential exit strategies are.
85% seems so high to me for using two or more monitors. Any guesses at the composition of the crowd? Management types? Circ folks? Catalogers?
Any chance some of them meant they used multiple computers? Some of our circ folks have an office/staff type machine in addition to the circ client. It’s not one computer w/ two different screens. (So there’s no way to transfer a window/etc).
Or a laptop and a monitor.
Or are they using a staff monitor and a corresponding patron monitor?
Not that I don’t believe you, it just doesn’t seem to jib in my experience visiting other libraries, both public and academic. (Of course, it’s been a while since I’ve seen others).
TTT at Midwinter is usually a very geek crowd. So I’d expect that this number would be very skewed. It would be interesting if someone was willing to do a survey in libraries about this.