ALA Midwinter 2011: Top Tech Trends Focus on Econtent, the Device Divide, and New IT Needs
By David Rapp Jan 13, 2011The Top Technology Trends (TTT) moderated discussion at ALA Midwinter 2011, held by the ALA's Library & Information Technology Association (LITA), was a somewhat subdued but thoughtful affair—focusing mainly on the uses of econtent and less on gadgets than the last TTT panel at ALA's 2010 annual conference.
Personal digital archives
Veteran panelist Lorcan Dempsey, VP and chief strategist at OCLC, spoke about the rise of "personal archiving"—how more and more private materials, such as photographs, are now digital, or even born digital—a phenomenon that is exploding via social-networking sites and services like Flickr. He predicted growing interest in ways to capture and archive such data, using the example of famous authors, whose personal papers are often collected by institutions.
Reemergence of human-selected curation
Dempsey later spoke of how concepts of authority and reliability of websites may need to be more realistically examined. He cited the example of his daughter writing a school paper for which she was "allowed to use any old website, so long as it's not Wikipedia." Another of her assignments was to purposely introduce errors into a Wikipedia entry; it failed, due to Wikipedia's stringent moderation system. These examples show how opinions about authority and reliability about sources such as websites, he said, are "very unformed." Sites such as Pinterest and Blekko, he added, show a "reemergence" of the idea of human-selected data curation, and he foresees libraries refining their own curation of information to better serve their communities' specific needs.
Digital decisions
Other panelists delved further into data issues. Rachel Frick, program director of the Council on Library and Information Resources' Digital Library Federation, spoke about how libraries need to take a hard look at how staff and resources are used to manage their digital collections, and take advantages of opportunities to save money. As an example, she cited how an analysis of ReCAP, the print-storage facility shared by Columbia University, Princeton University, and the New York Public Library, showed that many of the materials it stores are also available for free from the HathiTrust digital repository—opening up the possibility of freeing up considerable space and saving money. She also stressed the importance of cleaning up data so that libraries can better evaluate the digital materials they have. Academic libraries, she also noted, need to build storage capacity in order to manage and preserve the rapidly growing number of digital materials. To address this problem, she said, they may come to depend on high-density data centers.
The cloud solution
Erik Mitchell, assistant director for technology services at Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, NC, predicted that the rise of full-text indexing of books and journal articles will change how research is conducted in academic libraries and other research institutions, and may require librarians to teach new kinds of research skills to their patrons.
Mitchell also spoke of how libraries' systems could be transformed by cloud-based technology models, which, he said, "make it far easier to manage library systems." At small and mid-sized libraries, he said, directors may question the need to employ their own systems departments, and instead outsource them, to save money and staff time.
Meeting patrons at their devices
Monique Sendze, associate director of information technology at Douglas County Libraries, CO identified what she called "the consumerization of IT," highlighting the growth of patron-owned ereaders and mobile devices. "We're going to have to make sure that what we have works with what they have in their hands," she said. Digital literacy programs will need to be developed to educate librarians on emerging consumer technologies, she said. "Today we won't have any choice but to support end-user devices, because if we don't, then they're going to go somewhere else." She also addressed the growing importance of data analytics—using patron data to predict patron needs—a trend she also spoke about at the TTT panel last June.
More content development
Jeff Trzeciak, university librarian at McMaster University, Hamilton, ON (a 2004 LJ Mover & Shaker), predicted that self-publishing would become more popular in the world at large, and envisioned university libraries collaborating with faculty to find new sources of content to publish themselves—the academic library effectively "becoming a digital press." He also talked about how WikiLeaks could affect the availability of information. The federal government, he said, may make more documents classified in reaction to WikiLeaks, and officials could decide to put less information into written form in order to avoid it getting stolen and revealed.
Closing the financial gap
One audience member asked the panelists to address the "financial gap" between patrons who are able to afford high-end electronic devices and those who cannot. Sendze said that while libraries see themselves as "the people to bridge the gap between the haves and the have-nots," it was nonetheless important to address the needs of the "haves," who are also library users. However, she said, it was also important for libraries to make technology such as iPads available, so that have-nots will get essential experience with it.
ILSs not "a key differentiator"
Another audience member asked about trends in integrated library systems (ILSs). Mitchell noted that open-source ILSs were interesting, but didn't feel that ILS development was progressing at a fast pace. "I think there's not an economic or service model that's motivating us now to do something significantly different.... I don't think the ILS is going to be the key differentiator for libraries in the future." Dempsey mentioned OCLC's Web-scale Management Services, its cloud-based ILS currently in development.
The panel was moderated by Jason Vaughan, LITA Top Tech Trends committee chair and director of library technologies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. The complete TTT discussion (minus the first few minutes, due to network difficulties) is available on Ustream.
