technology trends: January 2007 Archives

I've just returned from a trip to Seattle for the ALA Midwinter Conference. In addition to having some great coffee and enjoying the beautiful views of the Cascades, I also attended some very interesting programs and meetings.

Some of the highlights included:

New Members Roundtable Meet & Greet, Orientation, All Committees Meeting and Social Hour where I was able to talk with other new librarians from all over the country. During introductions, I was often struck by how many attendees were working as digital projects librarians or on some aspect of digital libraries. This was encouraging and made it particularly fun to network.

LITA Top Technology Trends hosted a panel discussion with four experts (Clifford Lynch, Marshall Breeding, Karen Schneider, and Andrew Pace) to discuss trends in library technology. A few trends were no suprise; the next generation catalog, RSS, web-based services, Second Life, the rise of personal catalogs, and social networking are all very "hot topics" at our library and beyond. Other topics mentioned were digital rights management and targeting content to the ubiquitous (proprietary) iPod, full-text vs. surrogate indexing, the suggestion that a protocal for object reuse and interchange be developed to deal with issues associated with harvested metadata, and RDA and the future of cataloging. Mass digitization was another top technology trend and several of the speakers gave opinions on a future concern for libraries: the hosting and stewardship of large data sets and national strategies for data curation.

CONTENTdm hosted many events; including a Developer's Meeting, a Success Stories session to showcase projects, a social hour at the Pike Pub & Brewery, and the User Group meeting. Conversations focused on the new version 4.2 release and presentations highlighted the CONTENTdm API and the new features and functionality (customizations carrying through collections, ability to copy the cdm4 directory for test/upgrade, and new search functions). DiMeMa and OCLC were also present to listen to our comments and suggestions for further enhancements and improvements (UNICODE-compliant, expanded PDF support) to the software . It was great to see my colleague Glee Willis from Reno and others in the CONTENTdm community.

On Sunday night, I attended the Innovative dessert reception at the Space Needle with some co-workers and thoroughly enjoyed the chocolate, the view, and the company. All in all it was an informative and enjoyable trip!

As the new year rolls around, many of us are making resolutions for 2007 and thinking about what the future may hold. I ran across an interesting piece from MSNBC's Cosmic Log that mentions predictions for five technology innovations that are most likely to be successful by 2012, five years from now. Of most interest to me was the idea of the 3-D Internet. After my own hesitant explorations into Second Life, a virtual reality world where libraries are providing services to students via avatars, I can imagine the potential for targeting new users who want to be awed by their video games and their library.

I have to wonder just what this might mean for digital collections? Would physical collections be digitized by not just scanning them, but graphically recreating them in a virtual world that surrounds and immerses them in their historic setting? Would our avatars be able to interact with and use objects, rather than just viewing an image of them? For instance instead of a mere photo of an old Vegas street loaded onto a website, we could rebuild an imploded casino in Second Life with historically-correct entertainers and long-forgotten games of chance!

While this could be a very cool way to highlight collections and make them more interactive and social- there is potential for a frightening loss of control. In an open-source, wiki world editing is an expectation. Will our archivists and special collections librarians want to see tech-savvy undergrads "enhancing" historic materials by placing them in say, an underwater museum with fish swimming by? Maybe not. I guess we have five years to think it over...but until then I will focus on getting more materials digitized and accessible via the old fashioned and boring "2D" Internet. Happy New Year!