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Due to a scheduling conflict I regretfully had to turn down a chance to make an encore appearance at LITA Top Technology Trends at ALA Midwinter 2013, though I was highly flattered to be invited, particularly with an invigorating new single-topic format. At this point my Midwinter schedule is like a set of nesting Russian dolls reflected in mirrors and circumscribed within Venn diagrams.

But the invitation did cause me to stop to think about technology trends — at least, the ones I’ve observed in myself and the people around me, a group that I do not claim represents any specific demographic other than The Republic of Me.

I’m also setting aside the topic of books, except to note my own behavior below, for what that’s worth, and to observe that the concept of shared print monograph repositories is rapidly gaining momentum. Colleagues in SoCal held a summit last month, and I’ll be at the PAN Forum at Midwinter (big thanks to CRL for their national leadership and to Robert Kieft at Oxy for leading the SCELC convos). I’ve also been invited to participate in Subgroup 5 of the Digital Content Working Group, Library Community Education and Outreach. So, you will hear from me.

Anyhoo, the following may strike a few chimes with my readers and their own republics:

Ed Tech and Higher Ed

MOOCs: According to the hype, Massive Open Online Courses are part of the “disruptive” “innovations” that are creating a new “synergy” by “reinventing” higher education. Lubricated by endless conference chatter and initially uncritical coverage from the media, MOOCs enjoyed close to a year of nonreflective enthusiasm, with any number of institutions contemplating how to “get into that space.”

Inevitably, MOOC backlash has already begun, with several articles cautioning that warehousing at-risk college students in online classes may not improve graduation rates. Can the people say DUH? As Carlson and Blumenstyck wrote in that great Chron piece, “Here’s the cruel part: The students from the bottom tier are often the ones who need face-to-face instruction most of all.”  Students are increasingly not ready for traditional college when they get there, both in what they know and in their study skills and habits, and vast online lecture halls aren’t going to close that gap. Like the all-volunteer army, MOOCs are a great solution as long as your own kids aren’t the ones signing up.

MOOCS and other online learning methods do have their place. I have a blog post series in work — MOOC Nation — that will track my progress through two math MOOCs this spring. Stay tuned.

Devices and Distractors

At home, we are assuming that 2013 will be the year we retire my 1993 Honda Civic, which Sandy drives to work, a half-mile from our apartment. This old car, purchased used in 1996, has required very little maintenance in its life, so I didn’t begrudge it a rather expensive repair that will keep it from bursting in flames while Sandy is driving, always a nice touch, particularly where parishioners are involved.

So commenceth a slow, deliberate search which may stretch all year, aided or encumbered (take your pick) by iPad apps, websites, chat rooms, online reviews… but if it’s a car I’m going to sit in up to three hours a day, my rump wants first-hand knowledge. In a Honda showroom, the second or third feature the saleswoman showed me in the Fit, after how to flip the back seats around to make more space for groceries, was the USB charger in the glove box. I suddenly remembered early ads for Palm products, which overwhelmingly featured men — and here was Honda touting the ultimate chick accessory, the all-purpose device charger. (Good location, too: I hide my iPhone in the console of my 2008 Civic where it both recharges and is away from temptation.)

On other fronts, our Comcast TV subscription is on death watch–something we have heard from other friends our age, which portends poorly for the networks if their commercials are any indication, with their well-creased actors imploring us to Ask Our Doctor about the latest geriatric nostrums. We keep planning to deploy an exercise where–armed with Apple TV, Netflix, Apple devices with Airplay, various apps, and a one-month subscription to Hulu Plus–we avoid using the setbox for several weeks to see if we miss it. The networks are wisely gambling on inertia, because we can’t quite cut the cord yet. Interestingly, the preparation for this experiment has already yielded benefits; we can resume our old (and old-fashioned) habit of watching NBC evening news together by streaming its app when I come home.

December 2012 was the month I made my first mobile bank deposit, though I had to “pose” the check a few times to get it right. I waited a day and sure enough, the check showed up in my account. Routine for some of you, but quite a plus for for me and those occasional small checks that show up, consuming gas, parking, and time (though I will miss the crew, and the free cookies, at the Irving Street branch of Wells Fargo).

2012 was the year I shifted as many magazines as possible to tablet apps; we also gave up our paper subscriptions to the New York Times and the SF Chronicle and went digital-only for both. The drivers were comfort, cost, and convenience: my periodicals are always with me now, with excellent backlighting, and most support fonts that are comfortable even when I’m walking fast on a treadmill. Journals that are PDF-accessible but not on tablets get downloaded to Dropbox for tablet access. I only regularly read paper magazines on airplanes, during  takeoffs and landings. I don’t miss filling a recycling bin with discarded paper or stockpiling address labels to shred.

Paper continues to be by far my least favorite format for books, to the point where if I can’t check it out from Overdrive from my library or SFPL, or I can’t buy it in Kindle, it might not get read at all. The one routine exception is for reading on the Muni, for which I pack any small, skinny, interesting book in my purse because I avoid flashing an iPad or iPhone on public transportation. (Hello, Just Plain Data Analysis!)

Apple has me in its grasp fairly tightly — MacBook, iPad, iPhone, Apple TV, Airport Express — but in 2012 I began to feel more provisional about using Apple products, as Apple changed charging adapters, poured more devices on the market, and not only frog-marched iOS users to a defective Maps product but took a while to repent.  My iPhone also isn’t a particularly good phone–and that’s after two phones and two carriers. Furthermore, some of the best, most essential iOS apps come from Google.

That said, the ability to use Airplay to stream almost anything not produced by Apple’s Mortal Enemies (such as Amazon Prime),  Apple’s sheer ease of use, and (here we go again) the induced inertia of owning so many Apple products, gives us reason to stay in the fold a while longer. I have lived through WordStar, Commodore, Sony, Gateway, Palm, Blackberry, and many other companies that ruled the earth until they didn’t; some new idea is always out there, ready to sneak up on us.

On the homebrewing front–brewing being a technology that has been evolving for thousands of years–I didn’t brew from July until December — a planned hiatus, due to New Zealand and the Pythagorean theorem and whatnot. (It is astonishing how useful that theorem is; I even used it to estimate the necessary range of our new wifi router.)

I brewed a small-batch stovetop oatmeal stout at the beginning of our winter break, which I gussied up with organic cocoa nibs and a cold-steeped extract of Philz french roast, and yesterday brewed a cream ale, the homebrew version of American “swill”–though like most things, when you make it at home it tastes so much better.

Each time I was reminded why the young’uns are all about crafts and maker-this-and-that these days: with so much “digital” in my life, it was so refreshing to engage with grain and hops and water and yeast, kettles and spoons and mash tuns, and best of all, my glorious 22″ whisk, which serves as a mash paddle, wort aerator, and personal defense weapon.

My most complex brewing tool by far is my beloved green Thermapen thermometer, which also serves me well when I am grilling or cooking, or even when I want to instantly check the temperature of anything from a wedge of cheese to a room. I now make my yeast starter in a large Erlenmeyer flask, which looks geeky but hails from 1861, if Wikipedia’s somewhat sketchy citations are to be believed. There are all kinds of apps and equipment for brewing, but in the end, the brewer herself is the most important device in the process (returning to the theme that technology can’t solve people problems).

Last musing: a couple of weeks ago, while perambulating through the Embarcadero with Sandy, we saw a well-coiffed woman about my age in exercise gear, carrying a yellow Sony Walkman cassette player, and I almost stopped her to ask her about it. I just didn’t know what to say, other than “I used to have one of those, in the Reagan administration” or “You can skip the CD model and go directly to an iPod shuffle.” If she had been younger and dressed less conservatively I would have assumed it was a playful container for an MP3 player, but it really looked like a working Walkman. I guess it was working for her, but I was fascinated. I wonder what was on the tape!

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Smith-Corona Classic 12, by Flickr user mpclemens

I promised that post-ALA I’d sketch up some technology trends I have observed, to complement the trendsetting discussions held elsewhere, such as LITA’s Top Tech Trends.

“The Big Shift.” I had a number of mini-conversations with respected colleagues where we agreed that the adoption of ebooks and the shift from DVD to streaming was happening faster than even we anticipated. Netflix now streams more than it rents, the Kindle is no longer a novelty and has serious competition, and there are multiple publishing streams.

I am personally considering republishing my published essays as a Kindle or Google Books collection.  (I remember proposing this to an agent in Florida in 2009, who stared at me uncomprehendingly.)

For me, the Big Shift also has a hugely literal component: the shifting of books from libraries to offsite storage, and the shifting of library space use from housing low-use, just-in-case print materials to supporting individual and community information behaviors, pedagogical, creative, entertainment-oriented, exploratory, etc.

The “literal shift” is being enabled by the print repository movement, which is finally trickling into mainstream higher-ed awareness; it even made the Chronicle of Higher Ed last week. In anticipation of the ability to move materials offsite, I’ve been moving the pieces on this board by having our library join OCLC, implementing interlibrary loan (yes, I know, party like it’s 1977… we’re behind on our developmental markers), and implementing OCLC’s Navigator and express-van delivery for our Camino service (ok, now we’re ahead of most of you). That, and oodles and oodles of grim sloggy work, a lot of it still ahead of us, to ensure that all of our books are in OCLC.

Oh, and when anyone asks me about compact shelving, I reply, repositories. A far better investment. The print we keep will be display-worthy, the sort of books to showcase on bookstore-style gondolas with handsome endcap treatment, not to stuff into ponderous, expensive “compact” [sic] shelving with all the appeal of prison housing.

I’ve been talking about regional repositories in general, and WEST specifically, ever since I spent two weeks traveling through Australia in 2008 with repository guru Lizanne Payne.

Listening to her, I had that same “ah hah” moment I’ve had a few other times in my library career, like the first time I brought up Mosaic on my home computer and got the TCP-IP stack to work, and when a huge NASA image of Jupiter appeared on my screen I was so excited I had to leave the house and drive for an hour just to calm down. I haven’t shouted “squee” over repositories (not the same sex appeal), but as noted above, I’m getting ready for them.

I’m now going to let you in on a dirty little secret. I was asked the other day by a library student why I would shift materials offsite rather than rigorously weed them first. Yes, we do weeding, but it’s a bare smidgen compared to the size of the collection, even after weeding 6,000 volumes through last May and a few more hundred since then.

The answer is I will never have enough expert labor to weed our collection top to bottom, let alone do the sort of collection analysis to determine if I’m taking responsible “last copy” actions with our materials

In Iowa I’m giving a talk which feels almost too up-close and personal to me: “perspectives on present and future library trends.” Care to chime in? I’m feeling a little blurry, between packing and trying to finish my slides before I hit the road.

I thought rather than simply labeling something a trend, I’d talk about what’s waxing and what’s waning. There’s a nifty angle to this where I provide “their potential impact on libraries and library services.”

I’m trying to stay big picture… so that when I talk about “potential impact,” I can discuss broader themes.

Here’s what I have so far:

Waxing:

Centralized mass storage (paper and digital)

Ubiquitous computing

Cloud-based applications

User experience (focus on, thereof)

Large-scale cloud catalogs

Open software/standards/access

Social engagement

Service integration (such as discovery layers that tie together different formats; FRBR; federated search)

Waning:

Paper production (literally)

The locally-installed standalone catalog

Waxing and waning:

Print circulation (depending on the type library)

….

I think I know where I’m headed with my suggestions… the “experience library,” flexible and user-focused, with loads of examples of what this library looks like/feels like, what we need to be/do to provide these services. Still mulling over the big issues. I have 90 minutes.

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Note: be sure to read this post if you AREN’T going to ALA Annual — because there’s some free (as in zero-cost) participation opportunities here.  For this conference’s LITA Top Technology Trends, I am part of an online team honchoed by Cindi Trainor that will facilitate a concurrent online discussion. I will post to here, Twitter, and Facebook when I know the URL.

This time we are being given a series of “discussion starter topics,” some of which read like subliminal sales fodder, but no mind, it’s interesting to be told what my trends are. My comments below.

LITA Top Tech Trends Discussion Starter Topics
ALA Annual Chicago, July 2009

~IT, the Economy, and the Environment
In five years, shrinking institutional budgets, shifting user needs, and heightened environmental awareness will create a library profession largely based in online and virtual worlds. A new Internet and rapid change in communication and collaborative technologies will bring about a new commodity information profession in which half of all librarians will be unaffiliated freelance professionals who contract their services remotely to multiple institutions. The conference model for professional development will be gone, and ALA and other professional organizations will serve the role of coordinating online tools and training for information service specializations.

Not that fast and not that extreme. These are all real trends but they will happen more slowly. As for “virtual worlds,” I think we’ve seen Second Life come and go. Fun experiment, now move along folks.

~Open Everything (software, data, systems, etc) and Network Effect
In five years, further consolidation and upheaval will turn the library software market on its head. The drive towards open source systems, open linked data, open APIs, and network-level data and services will have gained full steam as libraries come to own, develop, share, and manage all of their own systems and data. A few major players will provide the network and service backbone, but the majority of the vendor market will shift to providing contract consulting and development services along with offerings of plug-ins and modules that they have built to augment to the unified data / systems superstructure owned and cooperatively managed by library governance bodies and co-ops. [With their new-found unity, libraries will band together to force Elsevier to open it's article content and drop prices.]

Holy grammar, Batman! Never mind these exotic predictions. In five years librarians still won’t be familiar with Mr. Apostrophe and his twin cousins, the Parentheses. Call the copy editor, STAT!

There is indeed a trend toward openness and self-managed data and systems, and it is a trend that will grow and needs to grow, for the simple reason that it is necessary and healthy for us to build the tools we use to manage our content. How that fits into the cloud-computing model that is headed our way like a Cat 5 hurricane is unclear to me. I think it’s a good thing for vendors to get out of the proprietary-licensing business and into service and development — good for us, good for them.

~Mobile Computing, Virtual Computing, and the Cloud
In five years, handheld and mobile devices will outstrip desktop and laptop computers as the dominant computing platform, backed by an ever-present data and computing cloud run by private industry. Libraries will leave the storage and hardware business behind, abandon their one-stop-shop web sites and systems, and start profiling users based on their transaction and usage history, interests, social networks, and community/campus activities. Libraries will focus on two main areas: 1) Building tools and services that push content into the user’s personal and social computing environment, and 2) providing in their physical space for large displays and interactive peripherals that users can plug their own devices in to.

“In to”?

Anyhoo, I agree the desktop is fading and mobile/ubiquitious devices are on the rise, but what interests me here is that it seems to overlook what most public libraries do these days, which is transact huge quantities of physical materials. I think this the kind of trend it’s easy for academics to overlook, since behavior on campuses is so different. I spend a lot of time thinking about (worrying about, really) the fate of public libraries when physical media is preempted by whatever device(s) are imminent. The movement toward digital, on-demand reading/experiential materials has many ramifications, few of which any of us have explored.

(It’s so interesting to me, as a writer, how librarians forget how people actually use libraries — to like, you know, find things to read.)

~Current and Future Trends for the Library Catalog
In five years, the local catalog will join the card catalog as a thing of the past. The next-next generation catalog is no catalog at all. All content and data will reside at the network level as one pool that intermingles with the other major pools in the information string of “great lakes”–Google, Hathi Trust, Open Content Alliance, and a handful of Journal aggregators. The niche role of libraries will be aggregating and digesting information from diverse systems and custom-packaging it for their local audiences and local services.

Ah yes, the Haughty Trust (bad me, did I say that?). If we really do move to the all-important cloud (again, five years? I think not), we won’t be worrying about the Big O, or Hathi Trust, or anything else, because we’ll be out of business. The “niche role” won’t be enough to sustain a profession.

About to board, or I’d do my own trends. Thoughts? Additions? More typos to correct?

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My killer-app moment was with Summon, a new unified-search service from Serial Solutions that does what we really want a product like this to do: natively indexes data from its sources (databases, ebooks, OPACs, etc.) so that retrieval is fast and consistent. Summon makes your typical metasearch tool look like a rusty wagon with square wheels. (As for the alternative of A-to-Z lists for databases… they remind me of the grocery store toothpaste aisle, which has far, far too many options.)

Summon from Serial Solutions

LITA Top Tech Trends, smoothly orchestrated by its committee (with special shout-outs to Jason Griffey and Cindi Trainor). The tech even went up immediately! Michael Porter reports that in the video I looked like I was trying to lick the last drops of coffee out of my mug… watch it and decide

Great socials by Equinox and OCLC. Not as many folks as we thought (attendance was down at Midwinter), but both were good events. I left the OCLC Blog Salon to head to another event which the cabby could not find, so after 20 minutes I had him take me back to the Hyatt to return to the Blog Salon — what I later realized was me reverting to my Last Known Good Configuration.

Wonderful PUBLIB social at Baur’s — the best social in years, expertly coordinated by PUBLIB’er Mindy Kittay.

The Tattered Cover Bookstore. O.k., I have to admit, when I went there I almost had to poke the staff to get attention and their expressions were… bored; and the bookstore didn’t seem to have a whole lot of books. But I’ve spent years wanting to go there, and I done it.

Hyatt Regency Denver. I stayed in this hotel 15 months ago, for the first Defrag conference. I so adore it. Video art in the elevators, rooms that are designed around business travelers with movable desks and comfortable chairs, a great 27th-story lounge, a people-watching first-floor lounge… this is one of my top ten favorite hotels.

A meal and a social at the Curtis, a very amusing boutique hotel.

The LITA Forum 2009 meeting, expertly managed by my friend Zoe, even though I had to leave for a minute to rescue my Blackberry from the women’s room. I had to retrieve my BB three times at Midwinter.

Following ALA Council proceedings via Twitter. Yup, there are folks twittering key Council votes. Council may not be interested in transparency, but transparency is interested in Council.

Janet Swan Hill’s outstanding job on the Task Force on Electronic Meeting Participation. We got so much work done in advance we were able to cancel the second meeting — more time for exhibits, networking, etc. Isn’t that the point?

Snow – especially since it was other people’s snow. Didn’t have to drive in it, didn’t have to shovel it.

Lunches and dinners with my friends, and you know who you are. Christine, sorry I left early and had to cancel, but let’s pinpoint Chicago!

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Dorothea offers her own take on the Ithaka Report, which to borrow her excellent summary, is primarily about “the state of university presses and libraries vis-a-vis scholarly publishing.” Coincidentally, between power outages yesterday I read the Ithaka Report line-by-line and privately offered my own thoughts to several people, as a kind of throat-clearing for some other thinking and writing I am doing about the fate of small literary journals and our roles (note plural) as librarians in helping this art form (particularly note the word “form,” as in “not information pills but intentional artistic objects”) survive.

Dorothea briefly comments on the Ithaka Report’s assessment of institutional repositories as “dusty attics,” though I prefer to think of them as “Potemkin villages”; after all, my own attic is full of things I actually need to use now and then, or at least enjoy revisiting. Dorothea asks, “But siloing and Not Invented Here is the heart of the difficulty, isn’t it?”

Honestly, before I worked in an academic library, I didn’t know or care what an IR was. After I was led into the inner sanctum and shown the Great Truth, I thought, “You have got to be kidding.” My observation about IRs is that we have established these grey-lit databases (for that is all they are) roughly along the same lines we “invented” library catalogs. They are often barely visible, usually hard to use, marketed in advanced Biblish (”institutional repository” — there’s a phrase that rolls off the tongue), and most of all, built and managed along traditional library-feudal lines, that is, they are established institution-by-institution, so that Great Big ARL Number One can pull out its IR around the campfire and compare it to that of Great Big ARL Number Two. Of course, the metrics for comparison tend to be as illusory as those of most Giant Thingy Contests.

Not long ago I observed — as did another wise librarian colleague in a previous life — that for all the work some libraries were doing with IRs, the faculty seemed aware of, and preferred to use…. well, Blackboard. I participated in a Blackboard focus group a few months back and was astonished to hear faculty talk about the joys of using it for sharing preprints and other documents with their colleagues. It was easy to use. It was “in the flow” of their other activities. At least on that campus, they could share across and within disciplines.

My thought at the time was if Blackboard is so natural to faculty, why not encourage them to use it with abandon and then harvest the content into a space where we could do our amazing dog tricks with the data so that it could be stored, shared, and preserved?

My other thought at the time was barring the local example of Blackboard, if it were proved that overall subject repositories were more natural spaces for faculty to contribute data, would we be willing to accept this and work within this framework? Or as librarians are we only willing to board a train when we’ve built its tracks and set its maps and its timetable? (Part of that business of “we have no self-esteem unless we’re in charge on our own terms.”)

My passing comment about SRW the other day was due to my disbelief that we had again built another cargo-cult standard on whose behalf we will stand forever on the beach, gazing into the sky for those followers we are so sure will eventually arrive — a standard, no less, that requires the rest of the world to conform to us, much as our small tabby cat imagines the house and its occupants are entirely at her disposal and await her every beck and calling (though in her case, she may be right). Sometimes I wonder if we can ever do anything else.

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At ALA Midwinter in Seattle, once again I will sit up on a panel with a group of people I consider smarter than I am, and bluff my way through a discussion about Top Technology Trends. (It's Sunday, 8–10 a.m. , FAIR Spanish Ballroom, for those who love Sunday morning events.)

But it wouldn't be the same if I didn't solicit trends from YOU, gentle readers... which I generally do by tossing some of my own ideas onto the page and then allowing you to point out all the obvious trends I'm missing or wherever else I've gone astray.

What is a trend, anyway? When I look up the word in Google, I see the term "direction" used frequently in its definitions. So a trend pushes us somewhere... whether we want to go there or not.

This is what I see, at least in North America in early 2007. This year I deliberately chose very simple, broad strokes. Some of my observations may sound over-obvious, but I include them because I feel they are important to ponder when we consider technology in libraries.

People increasingly rely on and trust the web for news and information.

It is increasingly difficult to function without email, and even easier to function with it.

Many more people have IM than you might think.

The bookstore is going away. (That makes me sad, and yet I buy from Amazon, too.)

The film camera is an anachronism.

Wifi is an assumption in many settings.

Everyone has a cell phone. O.k., only 203 million Americans have cell phones, and only 2 out of 3 global citizens. Most of those citizens are teenagers and college students, for whom the cell phone must be attached to one ear for at least 80 percent of the waking day, as far as I can tell from observation.

It is now pretty much a given that anything you do in a public setting can potentially be blogged, podcast, or uploaded to YouTube in a matter of minutes. (Privacy is increasingly porous.)

Library vendors' customers (that would be us) are expecting more for their users, and asking harder questions.

O.k., predictions--want one? Evergreen, the open source ILS, will reach a tipping point in 2007--just enough new customers to put it on the brink of being to the ILS what Apache has become for web servers: the common-sense choice.

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