CIL2010: Dead and Innovative Technology
CIL2010: Dead and Innovative Technology
This panel was a presentation with several panelists, with 3 items of dead tech & 3 items of innovative tech. D. Scott Brandt moderated.
Bill Spence
Bill started by saying that people hear what they want to hear. And he gave several examples of what might make you old: remembering Phil Donahue, Bucky Beaver, etc. Bill really likes Modern Family on ABC, Holmes on Homes, Julia Nunes, Brooke Shields, Barbara Streisand, Kathleen Turner, Goodnight Sunrise, Fun, and The Morning Of, Gentlemen Hall, Living in Hiding, and Gold Motel. Bill listed three words that would make him retire to France: President. Sarah. Palin
Innovative items: the memristor, HTML5, and the social web
Dead items: CRT monitors, tape drives, and web access extortion from cell phones
Three things Bill knows aren’t going away but as an IT guy doesn’t particularly like: the iPad, iTunes, and Internet Explorer
David Lee King
David’s theme was bombs & blue aliens (Hurt Locker & Avatar).
Dead items: normal cell phones that are only phones, regular television broadcasting, flash drives (external hard drives or cloud storage is easier)
Innovative items: “things without hinges” (like the iPad),
Sarah Houghton-Jan
Innovative items: Android, DRM-free media, digital history data in augmented reality apps
Dead items: Adobe Formats, closed off library vendor systems, the freaking iPad. My world theory on the iPad: “The iPad is sexy. It looks good on the shelf, feels good in your hand. But it’s not sexy like your partner, Sean Connery, or Matthew Bellamy. It’s hot like a prostitute. It looks good at first but afterward you find out that it has many unanticipated side effects you didn’t anticipate.”
Amanda Etches-Johnson
Dead items: Flash, mobile apps,
Innovative items: HTML5, mobile web, valid mark-up, thoughtful design, watching users use your sites
Marshall Breeding
Innovative items: transforming ourselves from books as physical objects to books as digital objects, cloud computing, ILS vendors should be transparent, print on demand
Dead items: floppy drives, racks full of servers
Stephen Abram
Stephen closed off the panel. Dedicated eBook readers are dead. We need to stop seeing end users as their borrowing patterns). The book is an empty object. What is the experience that it contains? eBook stuff is not easy. Censorship is also dead. Steve Jobs is deciding based on his personal value system what we can download from his store. We are building a generation of kids who grow up mobile. The iPad is also dead — lack of functionality and openness. What else is dead? Our separated out proprietary catalog systems. It’s ridiculous to ask people to search all of these various databases, catalogs, and other search systems all separate and all hard to use. It’s ridiculous to expect our users to understand Boolean. Being out of the loop is also dead. OMG: Chat Roulette is the future of virtual reference. Spelling, grammar, and any kind of simple text is dead. Shy librarians are also dead. Some librarians are not paying attention to what is going on around us. Libraries represent “the right way.” There is the Google Way, the Bing Way, and the Yahoo Way. And then there’s us. We shouldn’t want our library searches to look or work like Google. We don’t want to let companies, people with agendas, or anyone else decide what our search engines privilege or filter or display. We all know an Eyeore librarian.
cil2010 computers in libraries
April 13th, 2010 at 8:47 pm
Love the site. First time commenter.
I whole-heartedly disagree with anyone that thinks flash is dead. HTML5 might be able to unify internet video, but it doesn’t do games. There are a lot of people on Kongregate, Armor Games, etc. who will notice if Flash dies. HTML5 is not necessarily the future. There’s still doubt as to whether it will even catch on. Youtube will probably migrate, but if they don’t (like if Google decides to stick it to Apple), then HTML5′s video dies.
April 13th, 2010 at 9:16 pm
I’m thinking that not everyone is using the word “dead” the way I would. Censorship is not really dead, we just want it to be. And I wonder at David Lee King saying cell phones that are only phones are dead. What he is advocating is lack of choice. I has a mobile that is only a mobile and I rarely use it – it is essentially my elderly mother’s life line. I spend $10/month on pay as you go. I also have an iPod touch that does everything I need a mobile device to do including wireless Internet access which is easier and easier to find even out here in the back of beyond. Why the figging hell would I pay $50 to $100 month ontop of the price of a smart phone? Too often those people we call “techies” forget that many, many people cannot afford the technology they are advocating. So, it should be about choice. Only need a phone? Well, here you go. Need something more? We got that too.
April 19th, 2010 at 2:54 pm
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