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Rebecca Jones posted this in Tech & Tools on May 4th, 2012 Special Post by Graham Lavender:
Last night, I attended a webinar by Larry Johnson, Chief Executive Officer of the New Media Consortium (NMC), who chatted with moderator Steve Hargadon about the NMC Horizon Project. You may be familiar with the Horizon Reports, which track the top technology trends for the coming five years in higher education, K-12 education, and museums. The Horizon research has significant implications for libraries and the broader information field, but before discussing that, let’s go over yesterday’s presentation.
Johnson was proud to say that the Horizon Project has just celebrated its 10th anniversary. They published the first Horizon Report in 2004, at which time they were focused solely on higher education because that was what they were familiar with (Johnson worked in the field for many years, including a position as president and CEO of Fox Valley Technical College in Wisconsin). He also feels that at that time, no one was working across sector lines, so they stuck with higher education. Four years ago they began looking at K-12 education, and there are now three separate editions of the Report, each published annually: higher education, K-12, and museums. In addition, they produce regional technology outlooks, which are specialized reports that are usually funded by either a coalition of educational institutions or the local government, and these cover regions around the globe.
Each Horizon Report begins with a group of 45-50 experts from at least 20 different countries weighing in on what they believe to be the most important upcoming tech trends. The NMC draws these experts
Continue reading Horizon Reports: Tracking Trends
Rebecca Jones posted this in Lib, IM, KM, Tech & Tools on February 11th, 2012 Heeding the advice I passed along a few days ago in ”Ways to Bring a Conference Back to Work,” I’m blogging the Halton Hills Public Library’s session at OLA 2012 Superconference (session 422 “Technology Made Simple! Moving Beyond Basic Computer Instruction” with Beverly King, Clare Hanman and Darlene Green of Halton Hills PL) The session – and the experience they shared with the audience – was solid.
Here’s my notes on how they are making the library the place for people to learn to apply and exploit personal technology devices:
they have 2 branches – both under reno or being rebuilt during the development & piloting of this service creating new spaces for all age groups including seniors they liked a program Old Bridge Public Library in New Jersey had developed a Senior Spaces Initiative with Seniors on Fridays, and learned from it they looked too at New Horizons for Seniors Program, a federal grants program for projects led or inspired by seniors, and worked to secure a $25,000 grant the TMS or Technology Made Simple program started out for seniors but it evolved to a program for all they purchased 5 e-readers, playbook, ipod touch, digital camera, 2 camcorders, 2 ipads, 8 laptops, plus patrons brought their own devices in also purchased cleaning cloths, storage bags, tote boxes & carts, extension cords ,bower bar, adapters, brewing system for coffee!! quickly realized that some devices can’t be used while being powered; people often didn’t realize that the device wasn’t powered off, but rather “sleeping”, so the battery would run down, and then not be usable for the next session
Continue reading How to “Make Technology Simple” for your Community
We’re coming to the end of the year and there are lots of predictions out there for a whole range of technology and trends. Great for big picture thinking and planning for the future. Check out predictions for:
* popular holiday toys — love this list of 20 tested & “Yule Elf approved” tech treasures for the holidays
* enterprise social collaboration software — Forrester predicts $6.4 billion market in 2016
* enterprise IT — Gartner sees CSMI nexus: cloud, social, mobile & info — see quote below
The new driving force behind IT for the foreseeable future is what Plummer [Daryl Plummer, Managing VP & Gartner Fellow] and his associates call the “CSMI Nexus” — comprising cloud, social, mobile and information. The CSMI Nexus forms “a phenomenon that is changing the world as we know it, and certainly changing the IT landscape,” he says. “Cloud is the means of delivery. Social is the behavioral style, the interaction styles. Mobile is the access mechanism. Information is the analytical foundation on which you figure out what decisions to make. You have to build a philosophy around that.
* themes for 2012 from Ross Dawson which I definitely agree with
I am sure there are lots more and I hope you’ll point me toward them but in the meantime, these are ones that crossed my radar today.
Jane Dysart posted this in Lib, IM, KM, Marketing, Tech & Tools on November 30th, 2011 Are you ready? Hamilton Public Library Chief Librarian Ken Roberts and I talked about ebooks a few weeks ago for an Education Institute “Conversations with Leaders” series. We talked about was the huge increase in ebook circulation over that last 18 months and how there was a real spike after Christmas last year. A recent Toronto Star article emphasized the same situation with ebooks in the Toronto Public Library.
So have you made your plans for supporting the even greater tsunami of ebook seekers following holiday gift giving of electronic goodies? If you thought it was ebook crazy last year, this year will be even multiplied at least ten fold. Suggestion: make it really clear on the front page of your website how to deal with ebooks — how to download to particular devices (step by step), how to find ebooks in your collection, tips, FAQs, etc. Be prepared so your customers don’t get frustrated and bypass your library.
Retailers have Black Friday and Cyber Monday. I think libraries should have a catchy name for the ebook extravaganza following electronic holiday giving – Ebook Xday, or maybe just Ebookday. Got some other suggestions?
Jane Dysart posted this in Tech & Tools on November 25th, 2011 Great Infoworld article on the top 10 emerging enterprise technologies. Inclues:
10. HTML5
9. Client-side hypervisors (desktop virtualization on the client)
8. Continuous build tools
7. Trust on a chip (love this phrase for security)
6. Javascript replacements
5. Distributed storage tiering (including solid-state drivers)
4. Apache hadoop (getting a little techie for me, but it’s open source)
3. Advanced synchronization ( whether Apple or PC, they are both ” moving to a cloud-enabled fabric of user activities spread across devices and applications.”)
2. Software-definied networks
1. Private cloud orchestration (“more agile and efficient shared architectures”)
Lots of food for thought as we build our digital strategies and plan for 2012 and beyond.
Rebecca and I had an aha! moment earlier this year about calling databases (the staple for librarians for years) websites. That’s what resonates with our customers — websites. They may be specially priced websites, or some that require a fancy login, but they are websites. For those of us who learned about databases so many years ago, repeat after me, “websites, websites, websites!” NO MORE ELECTRONIC DATABASES, ONLINE DATABASES, or just databases. WEBSITES only! It’s one of those “whack on the side of the head” things. Get on board.
I just had an opportunity to read the FUMSI (Find, Use, Manage & Share Information) Report on Social Media for Research, a compilation of articles published by Free Pint and edited by Marcy Phelps. As Marcy says, not only have the technologies and tools changed from the early online days, but so have the participants and the content. The articles included in this report are very informative:
* Twitter for business intelligence discusses lots of interesting tools for doing research using Twitter — a real eye opener for me!
* LinkedIn: An awesome resource for building your reputation, your connections & your knowledge
* The people have spoken: Tapping into the collective intelligence of social media to brainstorm a new project
* Social networks in reseasrch — I love the tips to improve your cold calling success.
* Evolution in source evaluation: Using social media data — includes great evaluation and influence ranking frameworks as well as influence metrics resources and tools.
We’re very excited about this new event taking place in Monterey, Oct 17-18. The first of it’s kind, the Library Directors Digital Strategy Summit focuses on “Strategic Choices for 2020″ in an intimate and interactive conversation. Strategic choices and decision-making are a challenge for all directors, deans and senior managers especially in the digital age. Options and alternatives abound, so how do we choose what best fits for our communities, campuses, corporations and governments? The new Library Directors Digital Strategy Summit is an interactive event which includes leading edge thinking, collaborative opportunities for evaluating different future scenarios, various perspectives and viewpoints, industry experts, and more. Digital strategy has been defined as the process of specifying an organization’s vision, goals, opportunities and initiatives in order to maximize the business benefits digital investments and efforts provide to the organization. This summit pushes us to clarify our visions and goals for digital strategy in library environments, shares opportunities and initiatives, and looks carefully at the benefits our investments can achieve.
This two-day summit is an interactive forum for library directors, CEOs, and CIOs of academic, public, government and special libraries to problem-solve, discuss, and network with colleagues. It features a mix of high level presentations, expert panels, round table and facilitated discussions with lots of networking/peer engagement time. It features one on one time with leading thinkers:
*John Seely Brown, Chief of Confusion; Visiting Scholar at USC; Independent Co-Chairman of the Deloitte Center for the Edge, & Author, The New Culture of Learning
*
Continue reading Digital Strategy Summit
I love this post from Dan Frommer, The Future of News is Going to be Awesome. And it has so many implications for those in the knowledge and information biz. Dan says: “Perhaps the trepidation is because the people who deliver today’s news — journalists and publishers — are the ones who could be the most displaced by the change. Most of today’s news organizations — newspapers, magazines, radio stations, television networks, etc. — will look drastically different in a decade or so. Many will disappear, and only the resourceful will thrive.” But for the consumer, it’s exciting. Here’s Dan’s highlights:
*People will have more sources of information and “news” than ever before.
* Information will travel even faster and be more portable.
* Software is the future of media.
* You are your own editor.
*It’s good to be a curator.
* Advertising will improve… and that will change the whole game.
* News and commerce must further blend.
More sources, coming faster to wherever you are whenever you want means that as you will need to edit and curate the tremendous flow with the help of cool tools…. and the business and advertising world will spin the axis another bunch of degrees. Yes, exciting, scary but pretty darn amazing for those of us trained to deal with information and knowledge flows, who are flexible enough to change quickly and fit into the new big picture of our organizations and communities. What are implications for you? your organization or community? Use your imagination and
Continue reading Future of News & Info
Just read this post, There Will be No Files in the Cloud, about ownership and access in the cloud and how the author used music as an example. Libraries have followed the music industry in many facets of its development — into CDs to store information and data many years ago, into iTunes and YouTube for informational, story telling and training videos and podcasts, and more. So when I read this post, the Global Library in the Cloud (GLC) or World Wide Library in the Cloud, popped into my head where are books are available digitally in whatever language you want. By clicking on a link you can download to a device to read or print, and there may or may not be a charge for this, and it’s as easy as Wikipedia I’m not sure how it will be organized, but that’s for the taxonomists and information architects to figure out! So in this GLC figment of my imagination would we need libraries? Well, certainly libraries would still
* provide community hubs for learning and discussion at all ages
* train participants to find authoritative information and specific facts & data — information literacy
* provide safe and social environments for all ages
* connect people without the means or abilities to the information or materials they need
* showcase and demonstrate new technology and new tools to deal with the information flood — technology literacy
So yes, libraries do have a future, but can you imagine a GLC?
Continue reading Library in the Cloud
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