Trendspotting

September 12, 2007

Richard Akerman

Crossing the Gap

• We live in the current state

• But we must plan for the target state

• We do this all the time

• But where is my flying car?

• Cultural change can be fast

Some important anniversaries

• 2009: 30 Years of VisiCalc

• September 15, 2007: 10 Years of Google.com

• September 28, 2007: 20 Years of Star Trek: Next Generation

• 2027: 30 Years of Google

• 2034: 30 Years of Facebook

• 2035: 30 Years of YouTube

I learned about the future from Star Trek

I learned about the present from Steve Jobs

image Copyright © 2007 Apple Inc.

Trends

• Science

• Library Technology

• Scholarly Publishing

Science

• Data and computation intensive science– Large Hadron Collider (LHC)– Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST)

• Bioinformatics– Sequence your own genome

• Craig Venter• MyDaughtersDNA.org• Economist article

– Proteome, Microbiome

Library Technology

• ALA LITA Top Tech Trends for Libraries– LITA blog, LITA.org, Bookism report– Open source ILS– User created content, peer production, participative web, Web

2.0– “live where your users are”

Scholarly Publishing

• The march of Open Access continues, with much debate• CIHR Policy on Access to Research Outputs• Increasing calls for more semantically-rich publications and• Data-based search and visualisation

– http://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/– http://chemgate.emolecules.com/

• Use of video– Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE)– http://bioscreencast.com/– http://www.scivee.tv/– http://www.planet-scicast.com/