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Page 1: Top Tech Trends

Top Tech TrendsOLA Superconference

Feb 3, 2007

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Are we here...

...or are we here?

Source: www.opte.org

In preparing for this panel today, I was trying to come up with a technology to highlight that would maybe help us stretch our imaginations a little. But what my thoughts kept coming back to was that I don’t believe any discussion of top technology trends would really be complete without looking at where the human relationship to technology is trending.

So, I wanted to start with this slide which I grabbed yesterday from the Opte Project. They’re a non-profit organization who have come up with a method of “mapping” the internet in one day or less. Not an easy feat. The goal here is to, in essence, monitor the net to analyze it for anything from detecting wasted IP space to how the net is being effected by natural disaster, war, or even censorship.

So I was looking at this and I had to wonder, where are we in this map? Are we on the far, outer reaches, or do we play a more significant role in this information fractal?

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We don’t always need to understand the big picture...

...we just need to know how to be part of it.

We may not know for sure, and someone asked me a question on thursday that was to the effect of “how do we know we’re being successful?”

Well, at one point in time, we might be able to point to circulation statistics, door counts, and reference desk queries.

Well, those statistics are becoming less and less pertinent as our society and notions of humanity bleed freely between the online and offline world. And none of us really understand it fully. Who can hold a firm understanding in mind of everything that previous map was representing?

And so, we, (and I mean libraries) simply become part of it, finding our own little niche, some quiet little corner in all that chaos.

And there we’ve stayed, trying to get comfortable...

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Open Source

Open Standards

Open Dialogue

Open ProcessesOpen Minds

Open Meetings

Open Data

Open Spaces

But that’s not enough.

We’ve been unable or unwilling to adopt the one major trend that is radically changing not only the internet itself, but a whole generation of users who are being indoctrinated into a world where sharing content, thoughts and ideas is the norm.

So, we’re at the threshold of an open world. And it may all seem very freewheeling and a little scary to us, but that’s not to say that there isn’t a design behind all of it. We just may not be able to see it or understand what that design is.

A good example of openness that I like to use, is one that is probably overused, and that is the linux operating system. I owe my system administration roots to it, so I have an inevitable affinity to it, but I still hold it in my mind as one of the great achievements of the 20th century.

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Cooperate!(dammit!)

So, as libraries, we really have to ask ourselves “Are we are truly cooperating with one another to the fullest extent of our abilities?”

From where I stand, we can often barely communicate and cooperate within our own organizations, let alone on a macro scale.

And there’ really little excuse for that given all the technology at our disposal. If a group of rag-tag programmers can come together to build up a world-class operating system, we--librarians--guardians of the great tome should be able to co-opt to collectively improve our systems, our data, our infrastructure, our common knowledge

And do all that while sharing our time, expertise, software, data, and knowledge with one another.

But that begins with the willingness to do so.

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Case in point...

I like to point to Evergreen and Georgia Pines as an example of what can happen when libraries cooperate.

Here is a case where over 80% of the state of Georgia decided to adopt an open source ILS. This, in my mind, was the single most significant event in librarianship last year.

From a cost perspective, alone, the results are jaw-dropping. The Pines system required an investment of a little over $250,000 in harware costs and a small handfull of full-time employees. Spread that cost over all participating libraries, and the savings are staggering.

Cooperation made it possible for Georgia to do this. And also a leap-of-faith.

Incidentally, go search the Pines catalog and look up in the address bar. That’s XML you’re using--not HTML.

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The Semantic Web ... or something like it.

i. Web 1.0ii. Web 2.0

iii. Semantic Web(Web 3.0?)

Will all this “openness” lead to anything?

But for those of you interested in future, technological implication of all this openness, the semantic web, or something like it, is just around the corner.

The semantic web is essentially a way to publish information with embedded associated ontologies.

No? Ok..

It means that anything that is written for the semantic web will be read and interpereted just as easily by other computers and programs as it is by the human eye. So the implications for that are really astounding.

For example: Why do people go to librarians, and what makes librarians so valuable?

Often times it’s because the almighty keyword has failed them. The keyword index is completely incapable of presenting relational information between concepts. The keyword search provides only “Matches” but cannot say, “oh, this reminds me of a study I read last year, and you can find it here, and you know what else? This article might be of help too!” That’s is called knowledge-based information retrieval and it’s by-far the most effective research tool. It’s the type of research strategy that allows us, as humans, to make he wild, connective leaps of thought that lead to major breakthroughs.

But there is a major, inherent limitation imposed upon knowledge-based information retrieval. For instance, you could bring the ten best oncologists together with the best medical library, and the best lab with an unlimited amount of money and tell them to find a cure for cancer, and they could fail, only because the person who really needs to be there is an Iranian physician who speaks and writes only Farsi but has found a correlation between boiled fenegreig and cancer remission.

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Check your priorities

Initiate contact

Offer help

Build your networks

Do a gut-check

Cooperate & Share!

So I’ll quickly wrap this up with these cute little take-aways. I think it would be well worth your while to take an honest look at your own organizations and make a determination as to how open they really are. And if you’re not as open as you want to be OR should be..

you be the first one to make a move.

Michael is going to talk about some of the specific ways that openness is manifesting itself “out there” so I’m going to hand it over...

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Thank-you!


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