I’m excited and honored to be joining Meredith Farkas and David J. Fiander in a roundtable discussion of Top Tech Trends, an OLITA program at Superconference. We’ve made a pact not to share our trends with each other in advance (no peeking), so it’ll be interesting to see how much overlap we have and how differently we approach the issues where we do have overlap.

Sophistication

The search box with its flashing cursor is a powerful tool, but it’s positively pre-cambrian when compared to our hyper A/V culture. Voice recognition is a reality (try it with Phonepedia), but image search is soon to come.

Jim Bumghardner’s Flickr Colr Pickr and System One Labs‘ Flickr Retrievr are a bit toy like (in that they’re great fun), but Google is eyeing OCR enabled image search (with implications for Street View and a potential for real open source OCR). Riya is now a “visual search engine,” but in 2006 the company promoted itself as a kind of flickr with facial recognition. And if identifying your friends in your photos (as well as the crazy guy that made a funny face in the background of your vacation snapshots) is too narrow, Microsoft’s Photosynth will identify the location of your photos and stitch them into the larger fabric of photos around the world.

Contextualization

Our TVs (and DVRs) are networked, our phones are networked, soon they’ll both be smart enough to talk to each other and pause TV when we pick up our phone (this one does, according to Zach). But the technology that can do that is very nearly the same technology required to make our phones (and computers) aware of what’s on TV (and our TVs aware of what we’re talking about or surfing; see The Pudding). Advertisers are learning to take advantage of the detail afforded by technology, soon they will leverage its integration to target messages across media.

Watching TV, a commercial for a new car plays, you go to browse web, you see banner ads for the same car. You mention car to friends in chat, then sign in to Second Life and get an offer for free virtual car there. You buy real car, then get offer inside Facebook to get exclusive theme based on the new car.

Unlikely? Google recently purchased an in-game advertising network and has plans to generate automated psychological profiles of users, and an unrelated patent speaks of “obtaining revenue from the distribution of hyper-relevant advertising through permissive mind reading, proximity encounters, and database aggregation.”

But this isn’t limited to advertising. Our iPhones know where we are, how long before the maps application shows us points of interest based on that? Or perhaps our location will be add as part of our web searches in the browser? If locally or contextually relevant results aren’t too creepy, won’t we appreciate them?

Disintermediation

Amazon’s Kindle cuts libraries from the picture, but it could also cut publishers from the picture. Lulu.com made self publishing cool, and Amazon is aiming for the same market. You can read all today’s best sellers on the Kindle, but Amazon is hoping their Digital Text Platform becomes the publisher of choice for tomorrow’s

But, Lulu and Kindle books are difficult to access for libraries. How will we handle such materials? How might we use the huge volume of full-text digital content that is being created?

Somebody asked a well-published friend of mine for advice about how to get published. His answer: start a blog and you may discover you don’t want a publisher.

There is huge pressure in all markets to leverage technology to reduce costs, but that same technology also better enables content creators to speak directly to content consumers. And the growth of mashups has blurred the line between creator and consumer. Where libraries fit in this picture remains to be seen.

Identity & Reputation

I’ve been saying identity management is the next big thing for a few years now. I may have been calling it by the wrong name, but now it’s a reality.

Facebook is becoming an application platform, Google is countering with OpenSocial, and Gravatar has been acquired by the WordPress.com people. And in the area of single sign-on, Yahoo! and Google have thrown their weight toward OpenID.

But who owns your identity or reputation? Who owns your friends? Ebay reputation is valuable, but the exodus of users from MySpace suggests reputation there isn’t.

As we struggle with how to figure out how to deliver services to the Facebook crowd, commercial competitors are leaping right in. Amazon is courting Facebook developers (AWS Blog post) and making it easy for third-party developers to deliver library-like applications (book reviews.

Comments & Contribution

The biggest lesson I’ve learned from my work on Scriblio in libraries is the importance of comments in our systems. Cook memorial library in Tamworth NH, a town of 2500, is discovering new patrons and strengthening the fabric of the community in its comments. The Beyond Brown Paper photo archive has shown that it’s the people of the community that hold its history, the photos we have are only artifacts. Both sites have received hundreds of comments, despite limited access (at best) to broadband and other barriers to use in their target communities.

I was honored to be a panelist at the LITA/ALCTS CCS Authority Control in the Online Environment Interest Group presentation of “Authority Control Meets Faceted Browse.”

What is faceting? Why is it (re)emerging in use? Where can I see it in action? This program is intended to introduce the audience to facet theory, showcase implementations that use faceted approaches for online catalogs, and facilitate discussion on the relationship between structured authority data and this type of navigation.

Kathryn La Barre of University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign explained the theory, while NCSU’s Charley Pennel, Vanderbilt’s Mary Charles Lasater, and I each described its implementation in Endeca, Primo, and Scriblio respectively. Scriblio is an open source project that has less than one FTE working on it, so it’s an honor to see it compared against commercial offerings, especially NCSU’s groundbreaking work.

My slides are online in QuickTime and PDF form, and I was proud to be able to show off the new public beta of the Lamson Library website and catalog, based on Scriblio.

I should be careful to point out that faceting is a theory of cataloging and classification, while clustering is the technical process of aggregating and reporting relevant metadata in search and browse screens. The difference is that Scriblio doesn’t impose rules on our cataloging practice, it simply supports clustering the metadata to make it easier to find the resources we’re looking for.

If anything, the importance of authority control increases in faceted/clustered search and browse systems, but it is a matter of exchanging one set of technological constraints for another. Card catalogs, with their alphabetical access and physical affordances (or limitations) demanded cataloging practice that is in some ways at odds with the very different affordances and limitations of faceted/clustered search and browse.

Among current implementations, clustering does well with subjects, but poorly with authors. Looking at the cardinality of those facets, it’s easy to understand the problem:

(statistics from the Lamson Library (beta) catalog.)

The number of unique authors compared to the number of total authors is very high, while a large number of subjects are represented by a small number of unique headings. Still, some authors are well suited to faceted browse, and their emergence in a result set could be mined to help users further refine their searches. Example: J. K. Rowling is an obvious top author in searches for both “harry potter” and “j k rowling”. Her statistical “pop” in the results might be worth looking at and worth leveraging elsewhere.

As currently implemented, however, clustered results most help the user who doesn’t know the proper terms for her field of interest. A user searching “sociology of education” is likely to be interested in materials cataloged under “educational sociology,” and clustered search navigation works well in that and similar circumstances.

clustering, faceting, faceted search and browse, authority control, library, library 2.0 lib20, libraries, Scriblio, presentation, LITA, ALCTS