Massachusetts Experts Share Top Technology Trends

Wednesday 1:45 PM
Massachusetts Experts Share Top Technology Trends
Panel: Emily Alling, Scot Colford, Megan Davis, Vicki Wright, Rick Levine, Paige Eaton Davis, Amelia Peloquin, Bonnie Peirce, Elizabeth Thomsen, Scott Kehoe.


Emily Alling's Top Tech Trends - Helping people store information in non-traditional formats (multi-media, posters, etc...), More intuitive catalogs and interfaces (Aquabrowser) to help people find stuff, Federated Search Engines (WorldCat Local, etc...), Sustainability (Open Source Software, investing in people with tech skills, collaboration, etc...).

Scot Colford's Top Tech Trends - iPhone and portable devices, Microsoft Surface, Project Information Literacy - words flow through video in different spatial orientations as objects, words become objects, prezi.com is a way to create online presentations (get rid of powerpoint!), bumptop.com is a desktop overlay that creates a 3-D environment, IRC channel for the conference.

Megan Davis' Top Tech Trends - Mobile Content, Mobile Market, Mobile Services. 57% of mobile users (SMS or Internet), Visual Access allows you to take a picture of items/barcodes and get information (Movie Reviews and Times, Nutritional Information off a Mcdonald's wrapper, etc...), Audio Interactions (Shazam allows you to hold up your phone to a song and get artist/song name), Location (find the nearest Starbucks), Gesture Interactions instead of traditional navigation (turn the device to get landscape view, move the device to see a different view, etc...), Transcoded, Most Necessary content is what Mobile Web Pages display (Search, Library Events, Catalog, etc...), library vendors are beginning to offer mobile services, Washington DC Library - Library App, Mobile Search - offering specific relevant information, Spoken/Search, SMS/Text Search (Cha Cha, Yahoo, etc...), Libraries are texting to communicate with users, Send via Text Message.

Vicki Wright's Top Tech Trends - Instruction with multi-media because students believe that technology makes school more interesting. Using technology like online classrooms, smartboards/tablets and clickers allows for creativity, collaboration, and innovation by students. Clickers are used for quizzes and provide immediate feedback about how well the students understand the lesson. This is a fast and powerful evaluation tool for teachers!

Rick Levine's Top Tech Trends - 1-800-GOOGLE-411 to get information. Google indexing audio content with this service to create a database. Discussed the issue of proprietary rights for technology devices. Companies are restricting users to buying only their content for their devices (Amazon Kindle can only purchase Amazon books). Cloud computing - google docs allows people to access their content from anywhere.

Paige Eaton Davis' Top Tech Trends - To implement library 2.0 we need to go to where our patrons are online (Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, YouTube, etc..). Library 2.0 is information becoming interactive and coming from all directions. Catalogs and websites need to be attractive, fun, friendly and engaging, we need to keep up with current web "fashion". Let users participate through tagging, ratings and reviews (Darien Public Library). Add a Meebo widget to the "not found" screen of the catalog so that people will talk to a librarian and get help. We lose patrons when they don't find what they are looking. Let people bookmark to the catalog from where they are on the web (YouTube, Facebook, etc...).

Amelia Peloquin's Top Tech Trends- Twitter is another way for library's to reach out to people where they are. It does pose boundary issues for librarians and public servants. What are librarians perspectives about these issues?

Bonnie Peirce's Top Tech Trends - What are you building? Mobile platforms are the future. Technological and cultural advances are tied together, QR codes in physical locations to use technology to learn about spaces, and free is only as good as what you follow up with. Deliver information to people where they are.

Elizabeth Thomsen's Top Tech Trends - Social networking trends like Facebook are centralizing our web experience. The worry is what will happen as we contribute to these "gated communities" rather than the open web. Blogging, 3D, ruthless self promotion and managing your personal brand, piles of information available to the public, visual interfaces - objects, visual search, geo-coding (information embedded in image files expands their usefulness).

Scott Kehoe's Blog - Scott couldn't be at the conference so here is a link to his blog.