LITA's Top Tech Trends Advice to K-12 Libraries: Think Small
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Lauren Barack -- School Library Journal, 01/25/2010
Small and mighty may have been the takeaway from the Library and Information Technology Association's (LITA) Top Tech Trends panel held at the American Library Association’s (ALA) Midwinter Meeting earlier this month. There, five academic librarians cited the upcoming trends for libraries—many of them easily adoptable by those in the K–12 space.For starters? As schools continue to design Web sites, blogs, wikis and library interfaces, media specialists will want to imagine how these elements could appear on mobile devices, says Amanda Etches-Johnson, user experience librarian at McMaster University and author of blogwithoutalibrary.net.
Because design elements can eat up more memory and take much longer to load, sites that are more streamlined work much better on small devices, she says.
“So we’re seeing users get used to interfaces that are highly functional but minimally designed,” Etches-Johnson wrote by email. “So the smart response for all libraries, school libraries included, would be to reverse engineer the user experience of our Web sites and search applications to be more lightweight, intuitive, and functionally rich.”
Joe Murphy, science librarian at Yale University, likes several mobile applications that he believes school librarians can readily adopt for K–12 spaces, including the location-based social game Foursquare, Twitter, and even basic text messaging, which can be used for reference searches and even checking on circulation and availability of materials.
“The potential roles and uses of mobile applications for smart phones in school libraries seem only limited by the resources we can allocate to their support,” says Murphy. “Their flexible and powerful functions and customization make them a viable mobile gateway for nearly all information resources and experience.”
Jason Griffey, head of library information technology at the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga agrees that schools libraries should think small and likes ebooks as one tech trend they should consider, as he believes libraries will eventually adopt them—even if today’s current interfaces are black and white, fairly static, and likely to change, even this year.
“I don’t think [school libraries] should hold off, but they do need to be aware that any technology is temporary technology,” he said by email. “I think the next generation of ereaders (color, touch interface) is likely to be the stable platform for a few years.”
