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Sunday afternoon found many WFUers at the LITA top tech trends panel. If you want the full session, notes from it, or the twitter feed, hit the LITA live blog of the event.

There were lots of interesting ideas – the impact of the ipad on future client technologies, the impending adoption of e-readers and the impact that cheap e-book readers will have on the market, the importance of cloud computing, and the need to incorporate social/community features into your sites were just a few.

From my perspective, the panel included two really provocative ideas. First – the idea that libraries are positioned to no longer be the best place to access, aggregate, or preserve content. The panel introduced the concept that the problem of physical copy scarcity is almost over and that libraries, while optimized for print storage and preservation, are not necessarily the best environments for the digital analogues of these tasks. This idea recurred a few times, notably as the panel at turns indicated that libraries should embrace and be concerned with outsourcing. Almost sequentially, one panelst indicated that outsourcing IT to the cloud would free up staff to take on more patron-centric roles, while another indicated that most patrons are/will interacting with the library in a digital environment, freeing up public service staff to focus on more IT aspects. Of course, technical services was not left out of the ‘what does outsourcing mean’ discussion.

As anyone on the tech team who has been working on a little cloud computing project over the last year can tell you, it is easy to outsource hardware and software but very difficult to outsource expertise. I expect that as libraries grapple with the issues behind content access, core values, and efficiency this discussion will continue to be relevant.

The second really provocative idea came as a comparison to the current situation in the Gulf. “How will we handle our first information disaster?” one panellist asked. She suggested that an emerging role of libraries is to serve as a ‘strategic information reserve.’ We have seen some examples of technologies that support these ideas already – from LOCKSS to DuraSpace. I thought it was interesting however that the question, as it was phrased to me indicated the real problem – that each of these focused reserves may not be complete enough in a large scale disaster. In particular I thought that this question was nearly the answers that came out of the above issue.