LITA Top Technology Trends - ALA Midwinter 2010

Twice a year at the American Library Association conferences, Midwinter and Annual, the Library & Information Technology (LITA) Division has a panel of library technology gurus talk about top tech trends. At MidWinter in Boston this January, the panel presented a number of trends. (Missing: Clifford Lynch.)

• David Walker talked about discovery layers.
• Amanda Etches-Johnson spoke on user experience design. Amanda co-founded INFLUX, a UX design agency targeting libraries. The push toward putting content on mobile devices necessitates better UX design, in that with mobile devices developers are forced to give users the simplest access to data possible.
• Lauren Pressley talked about augmented reality, or, the blending of physical and virtual environments, as a great tool for learning or microlearning.
• Joe Murphy discussed mobile apps as a research gateway. SMS, he said, is the oldest and most popular of all the means of mobile communication, and the protocol has exploded in libraries in the past year, with services like Text a Librarian.
• Jason Griffey talked about mobile access to data in libraries.