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I got off to an earlier business start today with an 8 am meeting to listen to the LITA’s Top Technology Trends Committee meeting. At each ALA conference, several technology experts gather to predict the most important technology trends in the current library environment. Four of the current experts (Clifford Lynch, Marshall Breeding, Karen Schneider and Andrew Pace) were on hand to discuss their opinions on which technologies are the ones to watch; the committee chair read several for those who were unable to attend. Their predictions are also posted on the LITA blog. It was a lively discussion with some expected overlap on the really “hot” trends and some individual votes for others.

You won’t be surprised to hear that the big trends include the next generation ILS (presentation to users vs. back end functionality), mass digitization issues (how to present and manage the content of millions of digitized objects), mobile technology, social networking, shareable web, vendor consolidation and open source.

Some other interesting trends were: the roles of libraries in data (or digital) curation, object reuse repositories, the potential value in such interactive environments as Second Life, the rise and value of personal catalogs and ubiquitous networking (a future without software locally loaded on computers, everything becomes web-based).

There was lively discussion on open source ILS vs. vendor supplied. Most agreed that open source is not less costly over time. If you save $$ up front, you will spend them later in cost of development and maintenance. It’s a matter of deciding how you want to allocate your available resources.

Another interesting exchange concerned the observation that libraries are jumping on the bandwagon to reach out to where their customers go on the web (think Facebook, Flickr, My Space). Clifford Lynch cautioned that libraries should think clearly about what they hope to achieve by establishing presences in these environments. An example that was tossed out: if your patrons all hang out in a bar, do you really want to set up a library kiosk there? Another panelist talked about students who found it creepy when their professors turned up in My Space! In other words, have a goal for what you want to accomplish in your web outreach efforts and some indication that your users will be glad to see you there.