Sitting in a large and historic ballroom in the mayflower hotel, Washington. John Blyberg is sat at the top table looking awfully dashing in a tie - apparently a rare occasion to see John in a tie. Roy Tennant thinks it’s a world first.

Also up with John and Roy are Joan Frye Williams, Walt Crawford, Marshall Breeding and Karen A. Coombs, chairing is Maurice York.

The room is pretty full, maybe 500 people in all. Just a few more than the vendor panel I’ve just been on.

The official account is scheduled to appear over on Litablog, but there’s nothing up there yet, there’s supposed to be a podcast going up too.

Maurice York is chairing and introduces Marshall to start with his trends…

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Marshall starts by talking about the impact of consolidation in the marketplace, many libraries have been forced into migrations that they had not planned as a result of products being discontinued. Not all vendors can be tarred with this same brush. The consequences of these business decisions may produce more disruption than we’ve ever seen. Interest in Open Source is longstanding for stuff like Apache and Linux, but we’re now considering o/s for the ILS. Interest and understanding has moved from technology evangelists up to decision makers. Georgia is a great example, British Columbia is following on Evergreen, other jumping on board with Koha. But, in perspective the numbers are ‘miniscule’ compares to those buying commercial ILS. Will this become an avalanche of people moving to open-source ILS? Companies are popping up to provide support, LibLime, Equinox et al. But we must ensure we play fair; how will these o/s ILS stand up to the 100mpage RFP’s we’ve tortured ILS vendors with? The landscape has been well and truly re-defined.

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Jon Blyberg follows with something he describes as unsexy. It’s great to talk about frontends, but the backends really need to be shored up, sorted out. Better frontends will stress the entire system. Materials handling, specifically RFID, book sorters and shifters. Lori Ayre talked yesterday about creating a market for the long tail, which we can do, but we have to be able to support the demand for the long tail that you create. RFID privacy concerns have been raised, but for tagging books this bogus. Moving on, we’re saying a trend towards vendor interoperability which is very interesting, mostly at the frontend with products like Primo. To do that the vendors have to de-couple the opac from the ILS, which hasn’t typically been done. They also have to learn to talk to each other, which also hasn’t been done. Interesting opportunity for libraries, where they’re given the opportunity to do democratic development. With Evergreen and Rochester’s Next-Gen catalog, as customers can we be part of that market?

Walt Crawford, comes back on the RFID privacy concerns. a bit of ping pong goes on between John and Walt about the relative priorities and whether or not it’s the libraries role to address this. Joan wades in and suggests that both are persisting in using logic to discuss a political issue. RFID issues with the libraries were about getting the RFID message out, because unlike Walmart and the feds the libraries don’t have lawyers.

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Karen Coombs, talks about 3 trends:

1. Consumer content creation is awesome and huge, but there is no archival policy for YouTube. Her grandfather sent letters back from the war, today the soldiers in Iraq are emailing, blogging and posting digital photos; but who’s preserving it? There’s a huge potential for these things to be lost and libraries need to think about capturing it. Picture Australia is a great example of this, where the AL is gathering contemporary photos from contributors through Flickr.
   
2. Digital is the format of choice for our consumers. We all know that, but it’s getting “worse” in that the library has no provision for supplying streaming video, audio and so on. “I know everyone will cringe if I mention e-books” but we have to see that e-books are not the problem, the problem is the reading mechanism. Karen has 12 book cases of books and would really appreciate this stuff digitally. We have to get in this game, how do we get in this game?
   
3. Last thing is “off-the-wall” according to Karen. The line between desktop and web has been obliterated. Google Docs, YouTube remixer, Google Gears even more blurred, offline edits. This blurring of lines is only going to continue. We haven’t figured out how to get content to desktops, how do we get it into web applications?
   

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Roy takes his turn, but prefaces it with a caveat that the panel don’t consider themselves experts, but lucky people who get to spout…

1. Demise of the Catalog: being able to push the ILS into the back room where it started it’s life, so we can put new tools in the front room that help people find information. Primo, Verde, Worldcat Local. These tools unify access to lots of info sources, not just the catalog. Kill the term OPAC.
   
2. SaaS: library vendors, SD, OCLC. Libraries can get out of the business of running the software. Use the system on servers that vendors maintain for you. There’s no reason that can’t look exactly like it’s your own. Key benefit is software updates, transparent, painless.
   
3. Intense Marketplace Uncertainty: echos what Marshall said. Evergreen and Koha, intense disrupters. Dig at SD for pulling the rug from under their customers. Real support options for o/s. mergers and acquisitions. Worldcat local as a disruption. Google, direct content access and so on, make the business of creating an index irrelevant.
   

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Walt Crawford stands for the people at the back, who can’t see as the room is too long… Also picks 3 trends…

1. Privacy still matters: before you throw away privacy to be more amazon like, be sure that people know what that means and that it is what patrons want. Intellectual freedom is key to democracy.
   
2. The Slow Library Movement: locality, the library is part of its community. Mindfulness, think about what you’re doing and why. Pay attention to open-source.
   
3. Local Publisher: lots of libraries could be doing this with very small teams. Helping local people to publish. Walt sees this as a key role for libraries in the world of citizen content.

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Joan’s trends are not around technology, but around the behavioral trends. Things happen in cycles, and the cycle that’s come around again is the smorgasbord of technologies. Libraries respond as if new technologies were tactical. Trying to do the same thing, but using the new technology.

Joan recalls OCLC replacing a typewriter with a workstation, but they didn’t change any workflow either side, but “we’d automated it”. She relates this to her niece using a mobile as a phone, as a flashlight, as a camera, for texting and so on while Joan still considers it just to be a phone. This is the difference between simply seeing a new technology and recognizing how it changes the possibilities.

Fashion right now is to encourage library staff to adopt new 2.0 technologies by running competitions for an iPod or similar. This leads people to simply “tick the boxes”. You don’t just have to try or spot a technology, you have to grasp its potential and that is threatening for many people.

if the civilians don’t need us will they still want us

Half of the people Joan works with see that book sites are really cool and have really huge, potential - the other half saying “it’s not a library/you know it’s gonna break/I’m not sure we can guarantee quality”

“well hello, discovery has left the building, fulfillment is not far behind”

To make the library successful we have to adopt a technique from AI, self-organizing systems. Modify ourselves based on what we learn in real life. Currently there is an absence of feedback to intelligently evolve the system.

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The insight we can take from all of this panel session is two-fold.

Firstly, the world has changed; things are not the same as they were even five years ago. The way information is published, the way it is discovered and the way it is distributed have all changed. The way software is built and deployed has changed beyond all recognition. The library software industry has changed in response to this - some by changing what they do (that’s us!), some are responding more to the economics than the opportunity, through mergers and acquisitions.

Secondly, there is a huge amount of change necessary for libraries to adapt and evolve into this new world order. There are many opportunities in community building, service provision, technology facilitation and intermediation as well as a huge opportunity to help develop the web as a whole.

All in all a very good round-up of what’s what. Let’s hope those present can really grab the empowerment that was being given out and take that “let’s try something new” attitude back to their libraries with them.