CIL 2011 - Day 2 - Dead & Innovative Tech Session

I was a couple minutes late for this session as my dinner went a little late although I caught most of it. As usual it was entertaining while at the same time mildly disturbing and challenging.

I will briefly try and describe three of the 13 minute talks which I found most challenging.

Marshall Breeding's talk, as usual at these affairs, was the most laid-back and least funny, but it was still quite good. His main points were that the following library jargon terms and concepts need to change:

• The Online Public Access Catalog (OPAC) needs to change to a Discovery Layer System (like our recent introduction of Bibliocommons at the Winnetka-Northfield Public Library District/Cooperative Computer Services Consortium). Using the canned catalog system is no longer adequate in a world of Amazon and social networking.
  

• Federated Search, which allows searching multiple databases at once using and intermediate just-in-time search of all of the databases, needs to be replaced by the concept of Consolidated Search, where Google-like an index is made of all of a library's database holdings and searches are done instantly against an index.

• The centrality of the Integrated Library System needs to give way to the concept of a Comprehensive Technology Support Platform which takes into account all of a library's electronic assets

• The hype of Web 2.0 needs to receed back to just the Web, as the marketing concept of Web 2.0 is merely the delivery on the promise on what the Web was supposed to be in the first place.

I also liked Sarah Houghton-Jan's (the Librarian in Black) one note, although passionate longing for the death of DRM. Her key points that DRM is in the end ineffective, adds cost, hinders accessibility and access, and stifles efforts at preservation are all dead-on. As a community libraries need to find a way that we can provide easier electronic access to materials while respecting both the publisher's and the reader's rights.

Finally, as always, Stephen Abram's piece was a wild, passionate call to arms that is hard to summarize. Suffice it to say that Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Steve Jobs were renounced as three of the four horsemen of the 'bibliocalypse' (Sarah Houghton-Jan's word, but it seems appropriate here), with Bill Gates mentioned as a reformed and former fourth horseman. Meanwhile librarians were described as frogs that can freeze with the winter and as things warm up we need to find a voice and unite on a topic for the first time since some decision was made about catalog cards in 1975 (I missed that one as I was only 2 then). The only reference that Stephen seemed to miss in his frog analogy was the classic parable of the frog being cooked to death as the water slowly is heated, which is rather what I became concerned of as a distinct possibility at the end of this session.

Funny, informative, challenging, and scary.