Wednesday, May 18, 2011

Thoughts on (academic) library technology, pt. 1 of 8

Fresh back from an awesome experience at the Acquisitions Institute at Timberline Lodge, and preparing for the last CoALA workshop of the Spring this Friday, I have (academic) library technology on the brain. In the grand tradition of talking about library technology, I have a List Of Trends. Over the next week or so, I will have separate posts for each one. Which I haven't written yet. So if you have strong negative or positive feelings about any of these, let me know! I'd love to be able to incorporate your thoughts into my posts.

What I See Happening in the Next 5-10 Years

1. Libraries, publishers and vendors will continue to push more content, tools and services onto the cloud.

2. Mobile devices will increase in importance for use of library collections and services.

3. Visual search will (at a minimum) reach parity with text-based search.

4. Academic libraries' ability to use technology to mediate satisfying experiences for users will be the single most important factor in maintaining support from their host institutions.

5. Administrators and accreditors will drive technological change in academic libraries more than faculty will.

6. Academic libraries will move to integrate their systems with course management and enterprise systems at their host institutions.

I'm surprising and disappointing myself that I'm not listing open source on here as a trend. I think I will have to do a separate post just about that.

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