I’m starting way, way late on this thread. I don’t leave for ALA until Saturday morning, and I’ve been distracted by things at My Place Of Work (MPOW) and elsewhere.
Plus my brain is blank. White, Arctic, empty-screen, blank. All I can think is this:
Librarianship is finally moving into the second person plural. We are no longer serving they, that distant group, but you, the people we are trying to reach. (Even though sometimes when I say you I mean you providers or you librarians–the confrontational second person plural. But allow me a few inconsistencies.)
For a long time some of us have said that the user is not broken. But now we’re hearing these words repeated. Eric Lease Morgan started a discussion list for brainstorming and planning the “next gen catalog.” Librarians who might otherwise suffer in silence are speaking up about the limitations of the products they buy to serve their users. New ideas abound. There’s a general friskiness, a level of dissatisfaction, a rededication to problem-solving rippling through LibraryLand, a focus on providing a service to real people, and I like it.
In terms of more concrete trends–well, there’s multimedia, and broadband, and increased use of the Web, and more rapid acceptance of new social software tools. YouTube has been around just over a year, and its videos get over 50 million hits a day. Facebook has almost become synonymous with college, and the question is not whether young people will use MySpace but how we will guide them in this new tool. Privacy is rapidly becoming a more porous concept to younger users.
Posted on this day, other years:
- Nick Carr and Google and GPS - 2008
- Britannica, Sirens, and Sexism - 2007
- ALA and the Cone of Confusion - 2007
- Top Tech Translated - 2005
- Comments Welcomed: Top Tech Trends at ALA - 2005
- Treo 600: Schneider's Review - 2004
I’ve said this in a few places, but I think that a HUGE area that is going to explode this year is related to the “privacy is…a more porous concept..” noted above. That area is: Who are you online, and which You is the You you want to expose? How do you manage multiple online Selves? How do manage your online identity, and how will you manipulate it to present it to the world? The whole concept of the online self, the sociology of that self in relation to both the virtual and real world, and the presentation of that self is going to become more and more central a concern.
How do libraries/librarians fit in here? I’m not sure…but it’s information, and it’s organization, so we’ve got to start thinking about it.
Ubiquitous connectedness via cell phone, PDA, MySpace. Municipal wireless, library wireless, and free wi-fi in cafes mean never having to disconnect whatever device you’re using at the moment. It also means you never have to disconnect from the friends you are calling, texting, or blogging to.
That’s in the city, and if you have money. Get 20 miles away or a minimum-wave lifestyle, and it’s a whole other story. We’re not going to stop providing basic email and word processing services in the library any time soon for the many people who don’t have computers.
Visualization tools go mainstream. Aquabrowser and tag clouds seem to me like lo-fi versions of visualization tools that have been around in research form for a couple of decades now. Wonder why they’re suddenly taking off.
ISPs get serious about security and as a result, library patrons can’t get onto subscription databases through their ISPs. Good thing they know how to reach Google.
Speaking of which, let’s drop by code.google.com and, while we’re there, notice Google AJAXSLT — which reminds us, fat clients return! An Ajax application with much, much JavaScript and a well-designed UI can look and feel a lot like a locally-installed program … well, it is a locally-runnign (JavaScript) program. Gmail, Wetpaint, et al. are changing the rules for what ought to be a local app and what ought to be a web app. Unless you’ve got JavaScript turned off like Microsoft advises!
Enough for now.