Top Tech Trends 2012

1. Knud Schulz, Manager Aarhus Library, Denmark (also involved in development of Urban MediaSpace, a 300,000 square foot $320 million library+citizens' government services + building, opening in 2014)

His message was that libraries must change, or die.

Change

from Transactions - loans, searches, etc*

to Relations - new services based on facilitating relational communication

*whether virtual or physical, doesn't matter: transactions are transactions, relations are relations; virtual and physical are fused...

• users as focal point
• users part of the entire process - from creative imagining to testing to realization

His model sees library as four functions:

- learning space (teaching, courses, informal learning, consultations, homework cafe, self-service)

- participation space (meetings, lectures, politics, informal discussions)

- inspiration space (storytelling, reading, performances, book clubs)

- creative space (writing workshops, edutainment, gaming)

Library as a

• spot/place
• space
• relation

Transform the library

from the brand of a building housing books

to a building supporting and interacting with user needs

Innovate your libraries or die!

http://www.slideshare.net/KnudSchulz/trech-trends-in-public-libraries-ola-super-conference-toronto-422012

2. Alan Darnell, Manager Scholars Portal, Ontario Council of University Libraries.http://spotdocs.scholarsportal.info/display/sp/home

Trends:

• new librarians see technology can be good OR bad.
• librarians are abandoning traditional role of preservation. This is especially true of ebooks - only a few vendors "own" ebooks, wrap them up with Digital Rights Management, so they can't be preserved independently. No guarantee the vendors will make them accessible in the long term.
• has seen a nationalistic trend, an interest in preserving Canadian information, e.g, in having a Canadian Internet Archive, instead of letting Google do all the digitization. But he's not sure that will continue with the next generation of Head Librarians. There is a big pressure to move to "cloud computing"
• Sees academia moving to "the cloud" instead of having/being a physical gathering place

3. Paul Courant, University Librarian, University of Michigan.

As provost from 2002-2005, he was involved in the university’s challenge of the limits of copyright laws as part of the Google digitization project.

Courant noted that there has been a Revolution: copying and distributing copies used to be expensive, and now it's cheap (to users). Used to be print, now it's digital.

However, he also noted that Preservation and Access are now divorced -- as jobbers, vendors and publishers change hands. You can no longer be assured you can "keep" a copy of an article published in a given journal -- the next buyer of the electronic database may not buy up all the back issues, for example.

Darnell and Courant both felt the solution was to make our collections as public as possible, e.g. GeoPortal, Creative Commons licenses.

Very critical of Apple publishing books that would be available only on iPads. Gave Apple power to censor content, by limiting who could use/access the information, on the one hand, and who could publish information on the other.

If any RWL staff makes a comment on this article, you will receive Easter chocolate.