Sean Fitzpatrick's blog

A couple weeks ago I was experimenting with FBML AL site (that’s how we get those “Like” buttons on the blog posts, for example) and at the same time experimenting with Dlvr.it to push out content. Well, one thing led to another, and now we have a Facebook Page.

I feel like I spent most of my time at Annual meeting up with techie vendors discussing their product plans and strategies. I believe the ideas they share play an important part in shaping trends in librarianship, for those trends almost always have an antecedent technology component, and the technology the vendors provide must always fill some need if it’s going to be viable in the marketplace. In short, looking at what the vendors are talking about is a lens through which to consider upcoming trends in our profession.

LITA’s trendsters seemed to have some fun—and words of caution—with their predictions for libraries 3–5 years out. All the trend predictions had a clear emphasis on end-user experience over back-end library technology and future-proof, forward-thinking information services over preserving old workflows.

For a complete re-cap of the entire panel discussion, see the ustream video.

Serials Solutions, a leading provider of digital discovery tools and integrated management solutions, celebrated its ten-year anniversary July 27 at Annual. I stopped for some cake and to check out the celebration: founder Peter McCracken addressed the audience--a slice of Serials Solutions' 3,000 customers worldwide--on the history and future of the company.

Part 2 of the Trends panel focused on trends in the next six months to a year. This is where things seemed to get a little sci-fi-spooky, with predictions ranging from Star Trek–style materialization of common objects (in six months to a year) to computer screens that have better quality display than print magazines.

Here’s what the panelists had to say about imminent library trends:

Maybe it was the cavernous ballroom, but this year’s ALA10 Top Technology Trends panel seemed to have the biggest attendance I’ve seen. It was also the most information-dense, so much so that I’ll split the coverage into three parts. The Trendsters had three minutes to project trends for each of current, imminent, and long-term time lines.

Part One of my coverage is a wrap-up of their current trends:

Libraries and foodie culture have an obvious tie: cookbooks. All weekend long, the Cooking Pavilion in the Exhibit Hall will be celebrating that relationship with cookbook authors showing their chops with live demos and talks. I caught the first session, on healthy living through veganism. Dr.

“The change we need,” according to Tim O’Reilly, keynote speaker on day two of DrupalCon San Francisco, “is DIY on a civic scale. ” We’ve come to rely on what O’Reilly called “vending machine government,” where we put tax dollars in and expect services out, but real progress in civic organizations during tough economic times will depend on grassroots efforts mimicking an agile, open-source approach.

Yesterday afternoon I met up with some of the AL editors for a quick overview of a few of my favorite browser-based (i.e., cloud or SaaS) photo editing programs. Our idea is that to keep up with trends in online publishing, we all need basic photo-editing skills and anytime access to functional photo-editing software. So we demoed photoshop.com and Splashup. As we move toward web-first publishing, SaaS and other sorts of hosted solutions are becoming more compelling.