Library Trends - Future Horizons - transcript

This is a transcript of the video "Library Trends - Future Horizons", hosted on QUT MediaHub.

Transcript

[Caption] Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane Australia.

[Caption] Library Trends. ALIA Information Online 2015 Conference. information-online.alia.org.au

Sue Hutley, Director, Library Services, QUT Library: Hello, I'm Sue Hutley. I'm the Director, Library Services at QUT Library in Brisbane, Australia. As part of my presentation for the ALIA Information Online 2015 Conference I've asked a few of my colleagues from around the world to express their reflections of being a part of the first New Media Consortium Library Horizon Report 2014. This report highlights 6 key challenges, trends and technologies for academic and research libraries. It's going to be really important for us to discuss and debate these issues and challenges.

Dr Larry Johnson, CEO - New Media Consortium (NMC): The challenges that libraries are facing are just really unique.

Samantha Adams Becker, Director - NMC Horizon Project: Within one week of the report being released, it received over a million downloads signifying a clear need for this type of analysis in the library sector.

[Caption] NMC Horizon Report > 2014 Library Edition: Pressing Technologies, Trends, Challenges for Libraries. go.nmc.org/2014-arl

Larry: We work with experts on every Horizon Report, probably have about a thousand actively involved these days, and for them the rationale for them spending the time they do is that the work itself is kind of like a graduate course.

Samantha: We actually set up an online collaborative workspace that captures all the ideas so, these expert panels for over the period of around a month and a half are engaging in this discourse. We've put in further reading resources, tons of research questions and prompts to really stimulate the best in thinking. They come up with brand new topics, technologies, trends and challenges and what we do is kind of synthesise that, we compile the list of their new topics with our own. We ended up putting them into a voting tool and then they go and vote and rank the topics that they believe will be the most influential over the next five years. So the six key trends, the six significant challenges and the six important developments in educational technology are what you see in the final report.

Lindley C. Shedd, Media Coordinator - Sanford Media Center - The University of Alabama Libraries: We went to the wiki and there was already a ton of research and all these emerging technologies were identified. I felt like we didn't have to start from scratch and it was an obtainable goal. Everyone around the world have the same issues. This report does look at technology and the challenges of it, in this case in libraries. And you can see from the report that the items that ended up in the report are the top of that list. Redefining the roles and the skills of librarians is one of the ways that we are going to continue to make libraries relevant.

Solvable vs Difficult/Wicked Challenges
  Not understandable Understandable
Solvable Wicked Solvable
Not Solvable Wicked Difficult

Lindley: When you get into the wicked challenges, there is a whole section that is called 'the wicked challenges', and you really think about those and try to come up with a way to solve those problems - is not something that I see how to do today. That's why they are wicked challenges. But I think those are the areas where a lot of people are going to sit down and really think about how to address these issues. Or maybe there are still tools or ideas that need to be developed to help solve those challenges.

[Caption] On Twitter, use @NMCorg and #NMCHz

Lindley: And it's all about being willing to learn something new, take on a new challenge, learn a new technology and be willing to change over and over and over again. As a library professional, you have to be willing to change every five years.

Dale Askey, Associate University Librarian - McMaster University: Also I really appreciate the international approach that isn't the typical Amerocentric exercise where one takes the US experience and just extrapolates it out to the world.

[Caption] Acknowledgements. The research behind the NMC Horizon Report: 2014 Library Edition is jointly conducted by the NMC and University of Applied Sciences (HTW) Chur, Technische Informationsbibliothek (TIB) Hannover, and ETH-Bibliothek Zurich. Our partners' critical participation in the production of this report and their strong support for the NMC Horizon Project is gratefully acknowledged. The NMC Horizon Report: 2014 Library Edition is a publication of the NMC. Creative Commons - BY.

Dale: This had thirteen or fourteen countries involved, three different countries were involved in the leadership of the project and so the international perspective really came through. The survivor methodology is really interesting and it's a bit humbling, as somebody who has been asked to participate in this, to put ideas in the hopper and watch them get beat up by the survivor process. On the other hand, the consensus is great because otherwise these group processes tend to degenerate into - if they are done in synchronous mode in one room - to the person who argues the loudest and the most forcefully and not necessarily reflect a group opinion. So the methodology seems to really work.

Dr Joan K. Lippincott, Associate Executive Director - Coalition for Networked Information: They help librarians understand key issues in research, teaching and learning - the really mission critical aspects of the university. I think it is critically important for librarians to have this broad understanding of the environment in which they are working in order to shape their programs for their institution. The Horizon Report is also a great discussion starter. It can be used in one-on-one meetings, with faculty or in a departmental faculty meeting or with a library advisory group. It helps take the discussion beyond mundane concerns with the day to day operation of the library and into more significant issues regarding teaching, learning and research.

Mimi Calter Associate University Librarian - Stanford University Libraries: It was an awful lot of reading that had to happen but it was fascinating stuff and really exciting to be participating in. It was even more fascinating to go through the analysis and the survival portion of the process and voting things off the island. To think through not just what were the important trends because we had already done a lot of that but to think about what the priorities were between the trends and the timing between the trends and start voting things off the island and categorising things into timeframes was a different way of thinking about a lot of these trends and technology and really gave me a perspective that was different from what I had seen before.

[Caption] Fast trends:

  • increasing focus on research data management for publications
  • prioritization of mobile content and delivery

[Caption] Mid-range trends:

  • evolving nature of the scholarly record
  • increasing accessibility of research content

[Caption] Long-range trends:

  • continual progress in technology, standards and infrastructure
  • rise of new forms of multidisciplinary research

[Caption] Solvable challenges:

  • embedding academic and research libraries in the curriculum
  • rethinking the roles and skills of librarians

[Caption] Difficult challenges:

  • capturing and archiving the digital outputs of research as collection material
  • competition from alternative avenues of discovery

[Caption] Wicked challenges:

  • embracing the need for radical change
  • maintaining ongoing integration, interoperability, and collaborative projects

[Caption] One year or less:

  • electronic publishing
  • mobile apps

[Caption] Two or three years:

  • bibliometrics and citation technologies
  • open content

[Caption] Four to five years:

  • the internet of things
  • semantic web and linked data

Mylee Joseph, Consultant - Public Library Services - State Library of NSW: What about the adoption curve. We are all very familiar with the various stages of early adopters and late adopters and you certainly see that when you look at something like the ideation process we use. There were libraries who were describing what was already happening in their environment while there were other libraries who were nowhere near what was about to happen and needed the heads up and alert to start looking and working towards some of these changes that were coming down the pipe for them. Do academic libraries and academic library staff consider the research libraries, the national libraries and state and territory libraries and perhaps some of the special libraries as part of the information ecosystem that they are interacting with? And that perhaps with linked data and more and more digitised information, is actually part of the information ecosystem that their students and faculty and other community members are perhaps accessing for themselves quite readily.

Samantha: I think that what that is showcasing is the real opportunity that libraries have to foster that multidisciplinary research. To create opportunities for seemingly disparate disciplines and people to get together to share their insights with each other and really come up with an outcome that is representative of the entire learning process.

Larry: We want to let you know that our commitment to this library work is long term so you can expect an annual report each year. It's going to come out in the early fall or late summer. You can also expect, soon, a toolkit that you can use with the staff in your library to do interesting things with the Horizon Report. It's going to be an exciting time. We are really, really bullish on libraries.

Sue [speaking from The Cube at QUT]: So, if your libraries use large technologies or small technologies - library trends reports are one of the ways that you can envisage your library's future. So talk about the trends, the technologies and the challenges. Be part of your library's future and be ready for change.

[Caption] QUT, a university for the real world. CRICOS No. 00213J

Larry: We're going to take off now so we'll say...

Larry and Samantha [together]: G'day mate!

[End of video]