Top 10 Technology Trends
I went to a library conference on Saturday morning as several of my family members were there. Below is a summary by Diane Bedard from the presentations and discussions of Art Rhyno, Karen Schneider, Roy Tennant at the Ontario Library Association (OLA) conference.
1) SOA – service oriented architecture – a weaving together of differing parts of larger systems pulling in the best modules/subsystems to assemble a system that’s good at everything
2) Wiki – open source consciousness, collection of ideas, actions and expertise.
3) Authentication & rights management engines like Google Scholar which create a realization of resources and a desire to use them, but without the local connection where the user can see link to the fact that you already license that data for them users want resources you may have, but they don’t know you have . A disconnect between the search and the local digital rights. Need some way of digital rights “sticking” to the user when they search externally
4) The 3rd place the casual corner drop-in, the bowling alley. The local community place where people meet and chat blogs and their feedbacks are starting to be this 3rd place – leading to the FOAF effect (friend of a friend) the trust relationship built up online when you begin to accept/value comments made..what do you know about them, and what does someone you know and trust know about them? basing judgments on FOAF effect.
5) Open Documents – open source apps with xml backhooks so that everything moves naturally from the desktop to the web, from the document to the metadata database metadata created as the original document is created and sticky to it stays with the document as it ports (author, data, source, app, institution)
6) Information as conversations – blogs and RSS dialogue and responses
on blogs becoming the defacto starting place for thinking, jumping off point for inquiry. We use amazon.com for user reviews about books, often a first choice to help us decide about titles; so why isn’t this value-added information and peer-review a part of our catalogues? Best reviews come from Amazon, eBay not traditional publications like consumer reports!
7) Storage is CHEAP – flash drives and GB drives are now the norm people hold vast amounts of data with them this concept of really big, really cheap storage, wrapped in popular consumer devices leads to some interesting trends and possibilities.
A) The blending of print and sound what used to be print-based only (even online print) can now be fluidly moved to sound files and listened to What about the merged option of print and audio read a chapter, then “plug the book in” in the car and listen to the next chapter, then read the next one when you get home a merged option of both print and audio is intriguing and now with increasing bandwidth and cheap storage, these kinds of things can now use web delivery
B) “Listening is listening no new skill to learn just listen. Due to cheap storage everyone can download and hang onto more complicated, longer audio files; e-books, pod casts, “folk radio”.. and the consumer devices are already there iPods, cell phones, PDAs.
C) Hardware grid networking – WorldCAT (56 million records) is 23 GB in size can be downloaded onto an iPOD and carried around with you and still have space for your music! your patrons can carry around your whole catalogue WITH them and simply update (hooks in database “phone home” for current circ status?) so – will you give them that access?
D) It’s a POD POD POD POD POD world (see #7 above) SMALL devices with BIG memory which CONNECT are becoming the consumer standard high market penetration already highly portable, large volume, downloadable data carriers (some even wireless for live feed or update) so what are you going to give them? what do they want to have at their fingertips?
Processing power, mainstream indexers and Ram are powerful allies the whole WorldCAT can be top-loaded into RAM (instead of sitting on a hard drive with access delays) so that jobs requiring 96 GB or less of ram can be held in memory and not on the hardware what used to take hours can now be responded to in seconds instantaneous answers keeping everything in RAM gives huge speed increases indexers like Google Desktop can handle huge amounts of records handed out by the library, so may not need to do it all on our own anymore.
9) Social grid networking – blogs, chatrooms, wiki’s, podcasting, RSS’s greatly increasing networking across the globe, a fast building of a community of colleagues and expanded peer groups without the distance barriers (see the FOAF effect noted in #4 above)
10) 8.02.11i is the WiFi standard becoming the expectation that whatever device you travel with (laptop, pda, blackberry, treo) can be opened up and be live anywhere you are worksites, public libraries, schools, colleges, coffee shops how do you authenticate drop in traffic? Does this lead to vendor issues for who is licensed? How to authenticate for acceptable user and US patriot act-type identification issues?
Comments by Art Rhyno
Comments by Karen Schneider
Podcast?
A podcast is like a radio show but on an MP3 player. “For listeners, podcasting offers a diverse menu of programs, which can be enjoyed anywhere, anytime. Unlike traditional radio, shows can be easily paused, rewound or fast-forwarded. The listener doesn’t need to be near a PC, unlike most forms of Internet radio… Less than a year old, podcasting enables anyone with a PC to become a broadcaster. It has the potential to do to the radio business what Web logs have done to print journalism. By bringing the cost of broadcasting to nearly nothing, it’s enabling more voices and messages to be heard than ever before.” (Fordah) Podcasts can include Really Simple Syndication, or RSS, which automatically feeds text from Web logs and other sites to subscribers so they can read summaries from many sites at once. more…
