Top Technology Trends 2012 From ALA Midwinter Conference

The American Library Association (ALA) held its annual Midwinter meeting in Dallas in January.

At each ALA gathering, its LITA division (Library and Information Technology Association) holds a Top Tech Trends panel discussion. This year's session took place on Sunday, January 22, 2012.

The January panel members were: Stephen Abram, Gale Cengage Learning; Marshall Breeding, Vanderbilt University Library; Lorcan Dempsey, OCLC; Nina McHale, Arapahoe Library District, Colorado and Sue Polanka, Wright State University Libraries.

Here are some of the trends they discussed:

• frictionless access – smartphone technology that provides unfettered access to services without user interaction (Stephen Abram)


• advent of “enterprise IT staff” for libraries – bringing in professional programmers rather than librarians who like programming (Nina McHale)


• impending demise of the ILS (Marshall Breeding)


• trend toward self-service (Sue Polanka)


• rise of personal institutional curation services (Lorcan Demsey)


• on-demand tipping point– libraries offering a hybrid model to provide the physical experience for users (Stephen Abrams)


• web analytics (Nina McHale)


• reintegration of discovery with the backend systems (Marshall Breeding)


• technologies that take instruction in a different direction, e.g. touch screens (Sue Polanka)


• platform wars in consumer space and the implication for libraries (Lorcan Demsey)

The session has been archived on LITA’s USTREAM channel.