Dead and emerging technologies

Looking at Dead and Emerging Technologies
A panel discussion at HLA 2006

Aaron Schmidt

– floppy disks
– extremely restrictively limited computers in libraries
– CD-ROMS esp for databases: need to pay attention to remote access
– static, boring websites
– Frontpage
– things that Aaron says is dead are still in use

Jessamyn West

– the expertise level that comes between those who want to interact with others on the network
– one way streets like PDF files that I can’t get stuff out of
– PDFs not dying, but like other proprietary standards

Victor Edmonds, UC Berkeley

– technologies are tools to extend people’s power
– we produce around 100 hours of new video per week: question is what format can we put it in?
– DVD going out, but DV tape costs $30 per hour, that is expensive
– problem: there is no format you can count on, that has emerged like paper
– real problem for people who are producing a lot of video, in the future more of us will be producing a lot of video
– web-based services will replace some of these
– course management systems: for each course, the materials for that course are in that system (Sakai, WebCT and Blackboard)
– students already are saying if my course materials are there, why do you take them away from me at the end of the semester? I should be able to go look and see the discussions that took place in the past? So why should that be gone when I leave college?
– Technologies are dead: our vision has reached beyond our grasp

Marshall Breeding, Vanderbilt University
– like Victor I have a hard time killing off techs
– we have lots of interim solutions
– threshold for dead techs is tempered by
– many US libraries don’t have a website and online ILS
– so in that environment, it is hard to think about casting anything off as dead technologies
– my interest is in library automation systems: hopefully current concepts of an online catalog are hopefully dying
– many of what we have now are hindered by their legacy in card catalogs
– many meta-search engines are in use, but hopefull
– federated search model based on distributed query is really not working as well as we’d like them to

New/emerging technologies:

Aaron:
– weblogs permit people to get content on the web that otherwise couldn’t
– also good to promote the idea of communities
– hopefully vendor-based content cooperatives are dead
– IM is
– living in our browsers is an exciting phenomena: not having client centered computers
– having tools like Writely
– devices with longer battery life or less power consumption
– our phones might get better and bigger

Jessamyn:
– emerging where I am is getting our libraries on ANY ILS system
– many of my tiny libraries (5000 books, 1000 patrons) are looking at skipping big ILS systems and going directly to librarything (it is marc record compliant)
– info from US LOC is free but you have to pay 35K to get it
– that is changing
– USGS maps: you have to pay shipping
– now people are purchasing with groups and sending them to the Internet Archive
– more we are not going to see format not be a limitation
– people are getting smart about making things digital

Victor:
– cool to say “living in our browsers”
– where are we going in a real long term: 10-20 years
– going toward invisible computing
– Ray Kurtzweil is right when he talks about computers in our bodies, they will be embedded in our bodies
– he is now about 70, he may be the greatest American inventor since Thomas Edison
– recently saw him give a talk and talk about the recent trends in technology, that looks like all over the place
– now look at this in terms of squaring itself on a regular term (Moore’s Law)
– when you do that, statistics go to a straight line
– Kurtzweil is saying if you live another 20 years
– so question is: what are the steps toward invisible computing?
– at one point, libraries were the center of information in a community
— there have been lots of missed opportunities by the library community, but we can’t blame them b/c it would have required 20/20 foresight
– big emerging technology: convergence of the physical and virtual worlds (now seen through Course Management Systems in higher ed_
— sets of tools that provide info storage, announcements, interactions, wiki tools to collaborate
— Sakai consortium now involves over 200 higher ed institutions
— using these tools for research groups, student groups, etc — using these virtual worlds, populating it with people’s email addresses
— this is causing in higher ed a dynamic where some things take place online, and what takes place F2F
— handout passing out, lots of discussion is taking place online: dynamics are different online compared to F2F
— library community: will be like the virtual library

Marshall:
– should be on the way out: library interfaces that make the user search different places for different things (searching here for books, here for databases, here for articles, etc.)
– in development now: more consolidated discovery environments for libraries following OLI model (taking meta data from your catalog and other resources
– next gen; get rid of silos, present info the way users expect in other web environments
– also video and rich media: at Vanderbilt we have a tremendous quantity of rich media content we are responsible to keep for ever
– this archival role is very important, the networks never recorded much of this: proper curation is key
– have about 120 terabytes of info, working closely with LOC
– hard to preserve this, esp when you see how much video is being created today
– thinking about making
– getting almost to a post meta-data system for search and retrieval, increasingly based more on content of the digital objects themselves
– when Google has the resources to digitize the resource of the 10 largest libraries around, there will be search resources that include the full-text of many millions of books
– that really turns a new leaf
– seeing more automatic ways of indexing video, without it ever being touched by human hands
– not sustainable to use our current models of having humans watch it and manually and write abstracts
– new systems doing face recognition, speech to text– these technologies
– 20,000 videos uploaded to YouTube each day
– how are people going to find this stuff in the future, and who is going to make it available
– another issue: lots of the content is NOT in English
– need to have a better handle on the language translation piece

Aaron:
– DRM is currently a big obstacle for libraries sharing music

Jessamyn:
– copyright laws are a big obstacle today

Marshall:
– LPs continue to be sold and made, but that is a small niche
– CDs are the same way
– problem is how do you distribute music freely and still permit people to make a living
– doesn’t bother me at all to think about buying a new copy of a DVD, our old model was buy 30 copies of a bestseller
– need to find economic models that are sustainable

Victor:
– the current system is really a good deal for libraries and patrons
– your patrons are taking your copy of the CDs

Aaron:
– gaming already going to downloadable

Marshall:
– gaming solutions are the most graphically intensive applications
– until bandwidth and convergence changes this, we’ll still see a lot of these games remain console/PC based

And this was me in the panel (I didn’t take notes on my own comments)

I recorded this as a podcast and will publish later…. 🙂

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