Technology trends
From PLN
Technology trends
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Primarily material by Leslie Dillon (Leader's Digest)
Technology trends in general
Buying and selling eContent
I thought you might be interested in a few excerpts from John Blossom's report on the recent Buying and Selling eContent conference:
- Elsevier Vice-Chair Y. S. Chi emphasized that the content industry must move toward providing experiences and not just content. Elsevier is using a wiki platform to enable medical practitioners to develop a medical knowledge base--an important step forward for Elsevier to compete with other scientific publishers experimenting with social media.
- The Special Libraries Association panel gave an utterly stale list of complaints about content vendors. SLA members have been disconnected from much of the "experience"-oriented content generation in their organizations. If they allow themselves to focus too much on licensing agreements, their careers will be tied to their vendors (whose main revenues come through licensing content) and their organizations tied to ever-weakening vendor business models.
- The stalemated vendor "dance" on licensing is dragging down both vendors and their clients as they try to justify pricing schemes that don't bear on the ROI required to justify content acquisition costs.
- It's time to come up with new, more automated content licensing that will meet the increasingly "just-in-time"demands of institutional content buyers. In the meantime, SLA needs to become more visionary and to start participating in the development of standards for automated licensing already under way.
- Stephen E. Arnold pointed out that the enterprise search engine market is booming but failing to pull together all the content resources needed to create the most valuable and comprehensive content collections. With a growing audience for content via mobile devices and a widening array of publishing services from technology providers, it's not clear what the solution for content providers is. Publishers simply haven't reacted to what's available out there.
- The same theme appeared repeatedly at the conference: the increasing polarization of publishing caused by the rise of social media. Some publishers such as Berkshire Publishing Group are trying to balance traditional forms of publishing while exploring innovative social media outlets. But many publishers are challenged by the need to both balance traditional revenue streams and invest in social media technologies, which push their business model ever further from their core expertise.
- The rise of social media content uncurated by information professionals is also seen as a challenge. The rapid rise of WikiAnswers, the online Q&A community from Answers.com, is an example of how social media can create "social knowledge"--increasingly competitive aggregations of expertise that will likely eclipse traditional sources.
- Social media challenge publishers and institutions to come up with new skills and new inventories; most publishers have nothing that can be repackaged into social media. The rise of a new parallel content industry in a now-familiar medium has caught publishers yet again by surprise.
(John Blossom, "Buying and Selling eContent 2008: Soaring highs, crashing lows," ContentBlogger, Apr. 16, 2008.)
Business technology trends to watch
A recent article in The McKinsey Quarterly identifies eight emerging trends that are transforming many markets and businesses, some of which are relevant to libraries. This article is worth reading in its entirety and offers reading lists to explore each trend more thoroughly.
Managing relationships
1. Distributing cocreation. In many business sectors, companies are involving their customers, suppliers, etc. in the creation of new products. Outsiders can “offer insights that help shape product development... Information goods such as software and editorial content are ripe for this kind of decentralized innovation.”
2. Using consumers as innovators. Consumers increasingly want to engage each other and organizations online. Organizations “can tap this new mood of customer engagement for their...benefit.”
3. Tapping into a world of talent. “As more and more sophisticated work takes place interactively online and new collaboration and communications tools emerge, [organizations] can outsource increasingly specialized aspects of their work…”
4. Extracting more value from interactions. By 2015 employment in jobs “that involves negotiations and conversations, knowledge, judgment, and ad hoc collaboration—tacit interactions” is expected “to account for about 44 percent of total US employment, up from 40 percent today. Europe and Japan will experience similar changes in the composition of their workforces.”
Managing capital and assets
5. Expanding the frontiers of automation. The rate of adoption of RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) technologies is disappointing so far, “but as the price of digital tags falls they could very well reduce the costs of managing distribution” and help organizations “manage supply more effectively.” There’s still lots of room to automate repetitive tasks.
6. Unbundling production from delivery. Technology helps organizations use “fixed assets more efficiently by disaggregating monolithic systems into reusable components... Amazon.com, for example, has expanded its business model to let other retailers use its logistics and distribution services.”
Leveraging information in new ways
7. Putting more science into management. Technology helps managers exploit increasing amounts of data “to make smarter decisions and develop the insights that create competitive advantages and new business models.” The more an organization knows about its customers, the better it’s able “to create offerings they want [and] target them with messages…” For example, recommendation engines like Amazon’s “seem to be paying off: CleverSet, a pure-play recommendation-engine provider, claims that the 75 online retailers using the engine are averaging a 22 percent increase in revenue per visitor.”
8. Making businesses from information. Accumulated data captured in multiple systems “or pulled together from many points of origin on the Web are the raw material for new information-based business opportunities.” One kind of new information business could play “a pure aggregation and visualization role, scouring the Web to assemble data on particular topics.” (Is this a business for libraries?)
(James M. Manyika, Roger P. Roberts, and Kara L. Sprague, “Eight Business Technology Trends to Watch,” The McKinsey Quarterly, Dec. 2007.)
More 2008 trends
If you haven’t yet had your fill of trends to watch, you might want to take a look at these, which Information Today’s Paula Hane will be watching in 2008--if only to corroborate what you’ve already seen:
- Accelerating number of mobile content applications--and new devices.
- Increased spending for online ads with further declines in print [ads].
- Increasing popularity of widgets for content delivery.
- Increasing popularity of niche community networking sites as people grow weary of MySpace, Facebook, etc.
- Increasing use of social networking capabilities in enterprise settings.
- New collaborative workflow tools emerge as companies demand more collaboration.
- Increasing popularity of software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications.
- Growth of open source tools and services.
- Ongoing book digitization projects (Google, Open Content Alliance, etc.).
- Continued progress and growth in open access initiatives.
- Further movement from fee-based to free content.
- Continued buzz around user-generated content; publishers test new publishing models.
- Increased interest in text analytics, data extraction and mining, semantic search, etc.
- Continued interest in testing visualization tools for information discovery and analysis.
- Security and privacy remain major concerns.
(Paula J. Hane, “Review of the Year 2007 and Trends Watch,” Information Today NewsBreaks, Jan. 17, 2008.)
LITA top technology trends
LITA top technology trends Midwinter 2008
Speakers’ predictions at ALA Widwinter’s LITA Top Technology Trends included increasing open source, open access, interoperability, and user-created content, plus new computer gadgetry and the end of privacy. Below is a summary of speakers’ main points. This is long, so if you’re in a rush, just scroll through it and read what you know nothing about!
Karen Schneider
- Interoperability and standards implementation, such as ISTC (International Standard Text Code). By mid-2008 several large publishers plan to implement the standard, which “identifies the intellectual property that could be manifested in any number of ISBNs. For example, the book Moby Dick, Or the Whale would be identified with an ISTC; the Bantam edition, the Barnes & Noble edition, the Signet edition, the Norton Critical edition would each be assigned a different ISBN....ISTCs are not limited to books. They can be assigned to poems, articles, essays, short stories--any written work.” (Laura Dawson)
- Open source and open data. Service-oriented architecture (SOA) may help libraries improve ROI by providing better access to and aggregation of licensed information resources. E.g., with SOA, library consortia could build systems sharing common bibliographic/resource data but with different interfaces and search systems. SOA can allow libraries to use and improve information resources contributed by others and customize its delivery to customers. When you think SOA, think web mashups. (Eric Schnell) Librarians seem more open to non-library software, savvier about software selection and increasingly aware of user needs.
Karen Coombs
- Ultra-light and small PCs. They cost $300-$400, have limited storage and rely “heavily on the network and open source software to meet users needs.”
- New uses of wireless. Delft (Netherlands) Public Library can push content to people’s wireless phones, which means they could notify people about new books, fines due, or books available for pick up.
- Blogging ceases to exist as blogging. People don’t necessarily recognize anymore (or care) that what they’re doing is blogging. “For many blogging has simply become the way in which content is being created…”
- On the Go Applications and Data. Many people today do most of their business using web applications, and they’re starting to expect the same of their data. They also want to use the “smallest device possible” to complete their tasks. “Increasingly library users are expecting the same things. Therefore we need to make sure our systems interact well with these technologies that support portable applications and data.”
Sarah Houghton-Jan
- Tough budget, Tech stays. In spite of tightening belts and less funding, “libraries will at least hold their technology budgets steady, realizing that a lack of outlay now means that next year the library will be even further behind and its users further disenfranchised.”
- Widening Digital Divide and our Inattention to It. The “digital divide is a reality in our communities, and one that we aren’t paying enough attention to.”
- User-Centered Content Production. Libraries are becoming more customer-centric, letting users create content on library web sites and drive the appearance and the organization of that content as well.
- Virtual Reference Software. New ways to provide reference services include “non-library-world software” such as Skype, Live Person, and “commercial text-messaging programs to provide live cell phone text-messaging (SMS) reference to their users.”
- We Stop Being So Bossy. Libraries “are starting to realize that instead of acting in a paternalistic and patronizing way toward our users in the realm of technology, we should act toward them exactly as we do in any other situation that bears on customer service: we collaborate, we share, and we work together.”
- Open Source. Libraries, especially publics, are starting to look more and more to open source to fulfill their users’ needs.
Eric Lease Morgan
- Open source. The use of Linux as a server platform and as a desktop platform will increase.
- Open access. NIH grant recipients will be mandated to submit articles to PubMed 12 months after publication. Hopefully this will create more open-access content from publicly funded sources. If so, it’ll “be a boon to acquisitions departments.” It “behooves libraries to collect and index this content.”
- Social networking will continue to grow. “Facebook, with its ability to allow people to create programs for it through its application programmer interface (API), will probably grow faster than the others…”
- Blogging will continue to affect the way we communicate. “One of the powers of writing is that it transcends both space and time... Blogs amplify this power.”
- Network of globally accessible computers. “Each one of those words (”network,” “globally,” “accessible” and “computers”) packs a wollup, and combined into a single thing represent a huge change in the way we live and work.”
John Blyberg
- DRM. There may be a move afoot to abandon DRM for music downloads in favor of digital watermarks. That means that music downloads will have unique serial numbers embedded in them that tie each file to the original purchaser. “Obviously, this carries with it some significant privacy concern.” Also, it doesn’t look like DRM is being dropped from audiobooks.
- Converged Digital Media Hubs. “The Apple iPhone...allows users to take advantage of a convergence of media types–music, video, text, and two-way voice communication.” These types of devices are highly beneficial to consumers, and the market for them will only get bigger. “Many interesting possibilities for libraries there too.”
- Location Awareness. Most [new] cell phones are now equipped with a GPS locater chip. This technology will soon “couple with online social networking sites like Dodgeball so that friends and contacts can triangulate on your physical position at any given time.” This has very serious privacy implications.
- Surface Computing. Tactile “computing will become much more widespread as notions of what ‘computing’ actually means begin to broaden and extend into non-traditional types of devices (think Chumby).” The Chumby is a “small touch screen device that functions as a clock and also displays information from the web such as news, stocks, photos and more by connecting to the internet via WiFi.” (The Gadgeteer.) “Maybe someday...we’ll be able to use surface computing platforms in a convergence of reference, circulation, research, and instruction.”
- Fat PAN Pipes. Adoption of Personal Area Networks “has been slow because of bandwidth restrictions. That will probably change [when] devices begin to take advantage of Ultra Wideband (UWB)–an extremely high-bandwidth, short-range radio specification. Think USB or Firewire without cables.”
- Privacy is Dead. “We basically have the choice to connect or live out our lives in quiet and total obscurity.”
If you want to read more technology predictions, Stephen Abram, SirsiDynix’s Vice President of Innovation, has 30 listed on his blog!
Related articles
- Technology trends 2007 covers commentary for 2007
- Why look at open source now? helps you get up to speed on open source as a key to future library innovation
- From open stacks to open source - Joe Lucia offers insight on why open source is important for libraries, here and in part of Open source plans, a PLN Challenge.
- Future catalogs: food for thought offers a visionary set of future possibilities for the "catalog."
- Trends to consider - Going beyond the library, there's a consumer-oriented "trends" website claiming to have more than 8,000 trendspotters.
- Electronic services and security: Real library issues - Glen Holt discusses security issues, particularly as they might relate to outsourcing services.
