After years of purposely ignoring ebooks, seeing readers come and go out of the corner of my eye – and library collections and packages tried and rejected – I’m finally experimenting with a few new ways of consuming monograph-length content. Today, I consider the Kindle App for iPhone. Why lug around a separate device that …
Category Archives: emerging tech
New reports from EDUCAUSE and OCLC
Usually I rely on industry reports to put me to sleep, even those that generate lots of buzz and get described as “essential reading.” But today I’ve seen pointers to a couple reports that look really interesting and – bonus! – they each clock in at under 50 pages. The first is the 2009 Horizon …
Driving Emerging Tech
I was recently asked to speak as part of a panel on emerging technologies. Alas, I couldn’t make it, but the panel description and questions really got me thinking about how libraries decide what new projects to pursue and why. The conference in question was organized around a transportation theme (e.g., the technology bus) and …
10 Technologies to Watch for 2007
Popular Mechanics has published a list of 10 Tech Concepts You Need to Know for 2007. My favorites: data clouds (“you’re one step closer to retiring the original data storage device—the one in your head”) and smart pills (“could make a wide range of invasive procedures obsolete”).
How Do You Know Whether You’re Early or Late?
The conventional wisdom in adopting new tech is “Neither an early adopter nor a latecomer be.” But in our ramped up “faster” world, how do you know when you’re one or the other? I think it was just last fall that I first learned about Facebook, and just this past spring that I started hearing …
Continue reading “How Do You Know Whether You’re Early or Late?”
OPAL, Virtual Reality, and Academic Libraries
Looking for free or inexpensive continuing education opportunities? Check out OPAL, which describes itself as “an international collaborative effort by libraries of all types to provide web-based programs and training for library users and library staff members.” Most events are offered for free and past events are archived at the website. One upcoming event of …
Continue reading “OPAL, Virtual Reality, and Academic Libraries”
Traditional Publishing and the Web
Two interesting pieces recently came across my aggregator on the topic of the web’s impact on traditional publishing. The first is an article in the Chronicle, “Book 2.0,” about an experimental book format that allows readers to comment on the original text and the author to respond. The book under discussion, GAM3R 7H30RY by McKenzie …
What Are You Wearing?
Futurist Joseph Coates discusses some predictions about what you will wear in the Future of Clothing. Among them: Clothing will be able to change color and will sense changes in such things as temperature, moisture level, and anxiety As they become personal e-billboards and are infused with fragrance and pheromones, clothes will play an increasingly …
NASIG Conference: Robin Sloan of EPIC 2014 Fame
NASIG’s first Vision Session (aka plenary session) featured Robin Sloan of Current TV. The description was intriguing: “…Media is becoming digitized and disaggregated, free to float across the internet and get downloaded and uploaded, blogged and sold, pirated and appreciated, remixed and reimagined…. So what about libraries and scholarly communication?…” What I didn’t realize until …
Continue reading “NASIG Conference: Robin Sloan of EPIC 2014 Fame”
Keeping Up: Beyond the Library
There’s a lot of talk about “keeping up” in the profession these days. In addition to traditional journals and low-tech ways of learning like conference and workshop attendance, library blogs are proliferating and online conferences of both the free and pay variety seem to be catching on. With so many options just within the library …