I can’t believe it’s actually been more than 3 weeks since I attended the 2009 LITA National Forum (if you are a member of ALA Connect (which is free) you can also download all the presenter’s materials). This is my fourth year attending the Forum, and I think it was by far the best I’ve been to. Full disclosure: I was on the planning committee…but I think my enjoyment was due in large part to the fact that I knew so many colleagues this time around. Over the last four years I’ve tried to put more into my participation in the organization and the Forum in order to get more out of it, and it’s paid off.

That’s not to say that there weren’t some really great sessions though. This year, the sessions that stick most in my memory were the keynotes by David Weinberger (author of Everything is Miscellaneous…which I always describe as the perfect, non-threatening way to describe metadata (and in large part, my job) to my parents) and Liz Lawley of the Lab for Social Computing at the University of Rochester. Both explored the immersive nature of technology, how it is changing the way we think, the things we can do, the things we want to do. Along with the third keynote by Joan Lipincott of the Coalition for Networked Infrastructure, the general theme of the conference, “Open and Mobile,” was thoroughly investigated. (I urge you to download and listen to the general session podcasts at http://litablog.org/).

While the “open” end of things is something that I think about quite a bit (open-source, open access, open archives,…the list goes on), “mobile” is probably not on my mind as much as it should be. Beyond the (admittedly very cool) integration of special collections materials into things like guided campus tours (ala NC State’s WolfWalk…so cool! And mentioned in Joan Lipincott’s keynote) and the kind of ARG that was discussed by Liz Lawley, I have a hard time envisioning how the special collections materials we are digitizing can really be used on a hand-held device. For example, this map (http://digital.lib.ecu.edu/1034) is hard enough to see and understand on my relatively big monitor. I can’t imagine trying to parse it on an iPhone.

One of the parts of David Weinberger’s talk that was heavily tweeted was the statement “We have entered the age of Good Enough.” Meaning basically, (and I’m kind of butchering the point…you should really listen to the keynote!) that in the “age of abundance” we have entered, getting a quick, mostly right answer will do 99.9% of the time. But that just doesn’t square with my experience of archival research. What about archival research or any research with primary sources is quick? It is so heavily dependent on deep thinking and pulling conclusions out of the context of groups of documents that it isn’t something that a simple search will enable. It’s an argument, not an answer.

I think back to a comment made by Roy Tennant at the LITA Top Technology Trends session at ALA Annual back in July…although there is a trend towards smaller and smaller devices (web-enabled phones, netbooks, etc.), we will still have a need for our laptop/desktop computers. Each device just becomes more suited to the tasks it is best suited for. GPS-enabled directions? Finding a good Chinese restaurant within 5 blocks? Getting a map to the stacks so that I can find the book I’m looking for? Go to my mobile device. Working with Photoshop or Illustrator? Writing an article? Working with a digital special collection? Go to my computer…for now. I suppose over the next few years the uses of each of these things will continue to change. The thing I can’t seem to predict is how special collections research may need to change in the age of mobile.

What do you think?

Everything we do takes place within two contexts, immediate and broad. We all work within our institutions’ missions, and we all have our unique communities of users–NC State has strengths ag/animal science, engineering, and architecture/design–and so our digital collections have to fit our communities and missions. And then our tools have to fit those collections. For instance, the Built Heritage digital collection of architectural photographs and drawings soon will include Google Maps and a limited set of 3D models done in Google Sketchup. Both of these are free and easy to implement, and Google’s ubiquity means that they are immediately recognized by users.

The other context we work in is the growth of dynamic features of the web. My sense is that the kind of stuff we do on the web on our own time is a bit different from the kinds of things our users can do with the collections we’re building for them. Granted, innovation for the sake of innovation can be a good way to waste time and money. And, as others have pointed out, ideas are easy [sometimes], implementation hard. I can’t speak to how dynamic an experience is needed by a historic preservationist looking at photographs on Built Heritage (this is another post: how DO we know what our users need? Beyond that, as a colleague has recently pointed out, how do we know when our money put toward buliding tools is well spent?), but it’s easy to imagine some of what she or he might like to do: comment, share, embed, map, compare. How about explore? Interact? Sure, why not; but again, how?

In place of further suggestions, I’ll simply point to the 2009 Horizon Report put out by the New Media Consortium and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative. The report seeks “to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning, research, or creative expression within learning-focused organizations.” Here’s the run-down, with technology and “time-to-adoption”: mobile technology and cloud computing (one year or less); geo-tagging and the personal web (two to three years); semantic awareness and smart objects (four to five years). This list seems like a good place to start thinking about what we might want users to do with our digital collections. It may not be that we try to rush to implement the whole list, but some of these features are bound to start popping up on digital collections sites. Geographic awareness already is.

If special collections do become the primary way that research libraries distinguish themselves in the future, we’ll need to push online as much of our materials as is reasonable. So, large-scale digitization wins the day, and our online access layer to digital surrogates, along with the necessary tools and services, become extremely important. If the virtual researcher can go anywhere, what will keep our researchers coming back and what will help us to attract new ones? But why wait until then?