Environmental Scan

A Report on Trends & Technologies Affecting Libraries

August 2008

PHOTO ART: Photograph of a portion of the exterior of the Biblioteca Alexandrina, Egypt, showing letters from all of the world's alphabets, and etched into granite. Photo Arnold Hirshon.

NELINET, Inc. 2008 This document is intended as a resource for NELINET members and may not be reprinted or redistributed without the permission of NELINET. For questions regarding this report, please contact Arnold Hirshon, Executive Director, NELINET. NELINET, Inc. 153 Cordaville Road, Suite 200 Southborough, MA 01772-1833 Phone: 1-800-NELINET Fax: 508-460-9455 www.nelinet.net

ENVIRONMENTAL SCAN
A Report on Trends and Technologies Affecting Libraries
Prepared by Arnold Hirshon, Executive Director, NELINET - August 2008

Introduction
This scan is not intended to be comprehensive. The entries are illustrative and are meant to suggest some amongst thousands of significant issues that may affect library and information services in the future. The purpose of this scan is not to provide answers as to what will happen in the future, nor to how libraries should respond. Rather, it is to provide some bellwethers and trends, and for the staff to use this document to stimulate discussion as to how these might affect the future of their own library. (Some discussion questions appear at the end of this scan.) After an introductory section to provide a context for envisioning the future, the entries are organized under five broad issues: society and economy, technology, education and learning, information content, and library leadership and organization.

Context: Envisioning the Future

In every generation there are futurists who help us to put future developments into a broader context and who provide us with an understanding as to how we can predict the future, and more importantly, how we can use some principles to help us put those changes into context. Over twenty years ago I posited some underlying characteristics about the power of predictions 1 and principles for recognizing which predictions are most likely to prevail in libraries. The premise was that there must be not only a vision of what was to be accomplished, but also a focus (or an effective means of implementation).

Vision (What to Accomplish) creativity of approach perspective as to the importance of the innovation willingness to assume risk realistic expectations

Focus (Implementation) organization and careful planning recognition of reasonable alternatives revision of the approach based upon later knowledge pragmatism and acceptance of politics patience

Recently, two far more noted futurists put forth principles concerning effective forecasting. Paul Saffos 2 rules for forecasting are to (1) define the cone of uncertainty, i.e., the shape of the future is shaped like a cone, and it is easier to visualize the near term, harder over longer periods of time; (2) recognize that things take longer to arrive than you expect, and the form of the change will likely be different than expected; (3) embrace the things that do not fit your expectations and ask why does this bother me?; (4) hold strong opinions weakly, i.e., reach a strong conclusion quickly and then try to dismantle it; (5) look back twice as far as you look forward to perceive underlying patterns and the constants because there is a deep unchanging structure, and we should not use history selectively just to support our own conclusions; and (6) know when not to make a forecast particularly when uncertainty is great and wait for things to settle down before making a forecast. Saffo notes that it is not the pace, but the simultaneity and cross-impact of curves that will make a forecast inaccurate.

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Raymond Kurzweil both makes predictions and gives ways to know whether they will be accurate. Some of his recent predictions are that within ten years there will be a drug that lets you eat whatever you want without gaining weight and that in another 15 years your life expectancy will keep rising every year faster than youre aging. Kurzweil makes his predictions using what he calls the Law of Accelerating Returns, i.e., Certain aspects of technology follow amazingly predictable trajectories. Reviewing the history of the first electromechanical machines more than a century ago, Kurzweil notes that the machines power doubled every three years; then in midcentury the doubling came every two years (the rate that inspired Moores Law); now it takes only about a year. He goes on to observe that exponential upward curves are so deceptively gradual at first. According to his Singularity theory the big changes keep occurring more quickly such that the paradigm shift rate (i.e., the overall rate of technical progress) is currently doubling (approximately) every decade. Kurzweil submits that technological progress in the 21st Century will occur at a pace that is greater than that of the past 2,000 years, which will generate a thousand times more technological change than did the 20th Century. 3

Societal and Economic Issues

Rising Costs, Inflation, Recession. A perfect economic storm is rapidly unfolding that includes (1) a crisis in the banking and housing industries, (2) a dramatic drop in stock market values, and (3) serious devaluation of the U.S. currency. Underlying much of this are rising energy costs, which affect the cost of everything, including the cost to heat homes, the production of food, and basic transportation). This, in turn, will drive up inflation significantly. Combined, this will create strong recessionary pressures that will reduce the purchasing power of individuals and governments. In the past, the U.S. economy was such a major driver that it affected the rest of the worlds economies. However, the effect this time is far less great because of the growing economic power (not only as an exporter but also as a consumer) of the European Union in the developed world but especially because of massively growing economies in countries such as China, India, and Brazil. This will mean that our increasing economic weakness could well enable other countries to leapfrog past the U.S. in some key industries including our areas of the most recent strength: technology and service industries. Generation Y: Unique Social Attributes That Shape Their Interactions. In both developed and developing countries, the generation that is now coming into adulthood (sometimes called Generation Y, The Gamer Generation, Digital Natives" or The Google Generation) is the first generation that has grown up in a world where the Internet has always been present. As a result, this generation shares unique attributes that are shaping how they interact which each other, and increasingly these interactions are via the net and on a world-wide scale. As described by Forrester Research and others 4 , this generation is apt to share the following attributes: 1. They are likely to value style, fun, and technology. In ways that are quite different from previous generations, which valued book learning, Generation Y perceives learning through gaming as something that is fun and educational as they overcome obstacles, and as they convert the new knowledge that they gain from the games into their subsequent actions. As continuous consumers and employers of all types of digital media in their work and in their entertainment, they make heavy use not only of traditional Internet services via computers, but increasingly are massive consumers of wireless services on mobile phones. [More about mobile services appears elsewhere in this environmental scan.] 2. They measure success in terms of whether the task is completed adequately, not by how much time it takes to complete the work (whether that task takes more or less time to accomplish). They are bottom-line and results oriented that seek a work place based upon a meritocracy. As people who intrinsically seek improvement, and not necessarily rewards, they look for embedded continuous assessment through points and rankings some of which are built into the online systems they use and value. Seeking to be paid for their results, not a salary for sitting at a desk, their desired measures of accountability are made possible not only because they will work hard on tasks that they enjoy, but also because they enjoy working with others through technology. 3. This generation is highly collaborative, with an innate belief in the power of a diverse team. They thrive on change and want to transform the world they inhabit. To reach Generation Y, companies and information organizations must recognize and incorporate in their services a sense of immediacy, an understanding of Generation Ys sense of technological literacy, and a desire to work individually but through the global collective that is made possible through social networking and interactivity. It is through this collective that the Generation Y seeks, and has the potential, to change the world as dramatically as the Baby Boomer generation changed the post-industrial world after World War II.

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Societal Changes and Libraries: the JISC Report. 5 In January 2008, the British Library and JISC issued the results of a study that was intended to gather and assess the available evidence to establish whether or not the `Google generation are searching for and researching content in new ways and whether new ways of researching content will prove to be any different from the ways that existing researchers and scholars carry out their work. Some of the key findings include: About 60% of e-journal users view no more than three pages and 65% never return Most people on the web spend as much time searching as they do viewing actual content. They spend little time on sites for e-books (4 minutes) and e-journals (8 minutes), and they browse titles, contents pages, abstracts, but do not read in the traditional sense. Academic users squirrel away content in free downloads, but there is no evidence that most of the downloads are actually ever read. One size does not fit all. User behavior is very diverse by geography, gender, type of university, and status at the university. Users assess authority and trust within seconds, and they dip and cross-check sites and rely upon favored brands. Librarians need a much better understanding of how people actually search virtual libraries and use content. The report states that there is a real danger that the library professional will swept be aside by history. Privacy Issues and Personal Data Security. As Internet commerce grew, there was an accelerated willingness of people to give away increasing amounts of personal information (both intentionally and unintentionally). Major security breaches have also been reported at universities, where databases about students have been hacked. Between January 2005 and June 2, 2008, Privacy Rights recorded an astounding 227,115,680 records containing sensitive personal information involved in security breaches in the U.S. alone. 6 A particular area of privacy concern may be search engines, which provide a unique glimpse into the personalities and private lives of searchers. A recent study concerning search engines raised some key questions that users should consider regarding their search engines, 7 such as: does it record what users type into its search engine? Does it keep a full or partial record of your IP address? If so, for how long? How long does it retain cookies? Is data used for behavioral targeting? When does user data expire? While the practice of some search engine companies has become more transparent regarding these questions, there is still work to be done. Pendulums have a way of swinging back, and it is likely that there will be some market corrections concerning online privacy. Some of this will occur through government-led efforts and others in a greater awareness by people as to what is reasonable (or not reasonable) to provide about ones self on the web. For example, in February 2008, the European Union privacy regulators declared that search engines outside the EU have to comply with the EU's privacy regulations. EU rules require that users give consent before personal information is collected and that they have the right to object to collection or can verify their information. Among the stipulations under this ruling was that the collecting of IP addresses or search history will be considered as the gathering of personal information. 8 Further regulations from the U.S. and EU government agencies will likely follow.

Technology Issues
High Performance Storage and Computing Systems. While there are various innovations in the early stages of development (hybrid storage, nanotechnology solutions, various ways of stacking bits on a medium), over the next five years we continue to see hard drives shrink in size physically while increasing massively in capacity. In the consumer marketplace, flash memory will also advance as it expands in size and comes dramatically down in price as it become the storage medium of choice for personal computers. 9 On an enterprise level, terabyte level storage devices are already available for personal and small business use. High density storage at the petabyte-level is already available and under development for mass production by IBM. 10 The most immediate application for libraries is the opportunity to create massively large digitization archives at a negligible cost for storage. Two imaging technologies should be of interest to libraries: Microsofts Photosynth 11 and Haltadefiniziones ultra-high density imaging of works of art. 12 These two systems amply demonstrate how technology can make available to the scholar and to the popular user a depth of images that would otherwise be impossible to achieve.

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There are a number of interrelated developments that are making high density and high performance computing available without requiring high infrastructure investments. Grid computing includes both online computing or storage provided through distributed computing resources (also known as utility computing, on-demand computing, or cloud computing) and data grids, which provide shared management of large amounts of distributed data, thus creating a "virtual supercomputer" comprising loosely coupled computers that perform together to complete very large tasks. These grids are often loosely coupled, heterogeneous, and geographically dispersed. Cloud computing in particular is an extension of grid computing, SOA (service-oriented architecture) and utility computing. With cloud computing it is possible to provide software and infrastructure as a service using centralized servers managed by a service agent. Cloud computing is usually provided through web interfaces. Examples of cloud computing include Google Gears, Google Sites, and Amazon. Most major search engines and companies are looking to be cloud computing providers. According to the Gartner Group, Microsoft is expected to release a database cloud product later in 2008. Gartner also claims that such clouds will impact customers, partners, and the IT ecosystem. 13 Inexpensive Laptop Computers. Within the last year there have been significant changes in the ability to produce inexpensive, small, and powerful laptop computers. Leading this field was One Laptop Per Child, the project led by Nicholas Negroponte to provide networked computers to children in developing countries. To keep energy consumption down, the OLPC included a number of breakthrough technologies such that when it was made available under a buy one for a child, get one for your own, it generated a great deal of interest by technologists who see it as sexy and are eager to play with it. 14 It turns out that, among other things, the OLPC also serves fairly well as an ebook reader that works in bright sunlight. In addition, the computer includes built-in WiFi networking. Since the advent of the OLPC, there are now commercial computers that use standard hardware and software (both open source and proprietary), such as from Asus. Regardless of the specific hardware platform, this class of computers not only provides significant ability to work with different software applications, but is also able to use and even create networks. Continued advances in this field will make ubiquitous computing more affordable to the developing world and will continue to enable even greater technological leapfrogging than in the past. Mobile Computing Will Overtake Personal Computing. Within the past decade mobile phone use exploded in countries that previously had little or no landline infrastructure. Today, even in developed countries many people are dropping their landlines in favor of going mobile only. Mobile computing has become more practical than ever before, and a challenge will be to optimize the use of such technologies to enable effective research. There are a number of things that are happening in the m-computing environment that may well cause such a shift. In many respects, electronic services (e-services) are already becoming m-services. In the United States, for example, it is estimated that sales through mobile computing will soon generate 25% of all retail sales. Applications that previously were accomplished online (such as printing airline boarding passes) are also going mobile using 2D displays that permit high security scanning so that the phone display screen can be scanned at airports. Today, there are 3.3 billion mobile subscribers worldwide, a number far greater than the number of Internet users. The market research company Informa Telecoms said in a report that about 50 million people, or about 2.3 percent of all mobile users, already use the cell phone for social networking, from chat services to multimedia sharing. The company forecast that the penetration rate would mushroom to at least 12.5 percent in five years. 15 This could be even more dramatic if mobile device broadband systems, such as Femtocell, take hold and provide extended broadband coverage via mobile computing Perhaps the most telling sign of the advances in mobile technology can be witnessed in the meteoric takeoff of the Apple iPhone. In less than twelve months since its release, the iPhone has already captured a significant portion of the U.S. mobile phone market, and it is making significant inroads in Europe. A new survey by ChangeWave Research indicated that the next generation iPhone, having a tsunami-like impact on the smart phone market and that 56% of consumers who plan to buy a smartphone over the next 90 days say theyll buy an iPhone, up from 29% who listed Apples device as their phone of preference in March. Among current users, RIMs BlackBerry was the choice of 42% of buyers, Palm is down to 14% (from a high of 35% two years ago), and the iPhone is at 11%. 16 Given the potential growth curve, Going forward, RIM's share of consumer planned purchases is set to take a significant hit over the next 90 days, falling 6 pts to 23%. Palm remains a far distant third with just 3%.

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This explosion is being caused by the recent introduction of the second generation iPhone, the 3G, along with Apples release of a software development kit. Apple expects to sell 11 million 3G phones over the next five or six months. 17 With this newly opened platform, the iPhone is set to take advantage of the same hobbyists and professional people who have been active in the open source movement. Specialized applications, such as for libraries, will not be far away. Content providers are also looking for ways to optimize their content for the iPhone. For example, Encyclopaedia Britannica has a new iPhone reference tool that features a comprehensive library of article and image content to provide users with access to over one million pages of content. Other companies will not readily cede the market to Apple. For example, Google has its own mobile phone platform (operating system) called Android that it is marketing to other phone companies. Newer versions of Windows Mobile will also vie for attention. In five years what features will show up on these low cost phones? On the iPhone, people are doing Internet searches 50 times more than all the other U.S. carriers combined. 18 When Internet access from other devices is added, this number skyrockets. Therefore, the underlying technology for m-computing is changing rapidly. An important area of development is the emergence of Mobile Internet Devices (MID). The Wall Street Journal 19 noted that MIDs are a loosely defined category that is generally applied to devices that are smaller than a laptop and larger than a cell phone that connect to the Internet wirelessly using either Wi-Fi or cellular data technologies. The new Tegra MID chip from the Nvidia Corporation is described as a "computer on a chip" that will be particularly good for tasks such as watching videos and playing games on mobile devices. A device built around this chip is estimated to be able to play 26 hours of high-definition video on a single battery charge. Intels MID chip, Atom, has been selected for "30-plus" devices that will start hitting the market by the end of June 2008. Intels successor chip, due out by 2010, will draw one-tenth the power and offer more usage per battery charge. Adobe Systems recently announced an effort called the Open Screen Project to bring users consistent experiences with the company's software across PCs, cellphones, MIDs, and other devices Perhaps not in every respect, but certainly in many, mobile phones will start to substitute for desktop and laptop computers. Movies are already converted for watching on smart phones and MP3 devices, and in Japan e-books not only are read on mobile phones but are being written on them. Gaming, 3D and Augmented Reality. The use of gaming technologies, once the province of teens and nerds, increasingly is a part of online life. Whether in Second Life or on numerous gaming sites, gaming is playing an increasingly important role in everything from human interface design to navigation and these developments are set to accelerate rapidly. Rather than superimposing gaming technologies on existing technologies, the most effective use will occur when services and systems are rebuilt from the ground up. Just as the graphical user interface (GUI) in the 1980s and 1990s made it possible to do things that previously were either inefficient or not possible, gaming technologies hold the promise to enable the next generation to engage in electronic interactions in ways that were heretofore impossible. For example, gaming is thought to be a particularly good medium to provide training in hard-to-master skills. Gaming also provides a clear structure for collaboration and enables both open authorship and protovation (prototyping and testing of experimental solutions) that augment knowledge and talent. Through such protovation, it is possible to use gaming to go through multiple iterations and experience different options that can lead to success. The technology also can enable the users to participate effectively and efficiently in the process of inventing new products and service, and to test market assumptions. 20 A key element of gaming technologies is the creation of an avatar, which is the representative of ones personal image and being within the gaming world. As the technology is advancing, these beings are becoming much more life-like. As a result, instead of having to issue commands to create movement, it is becoming possible to show natural gestures and emotions through facial expressions and movements. Soon it will be possible to hold lifelike conversations, meetings, and classroom sessions, which will make international communications far more efficient and effective and reduce the need (and cost) of travel. 21 Regarding Second Life in particular, those who have been working in this area recognize that it ultimately may not be the platform of choice, but in the meantime it is a means to support regular instruction, experimentation, virtual labs, seminars, panels, community engagements, and collaborations among higher education and cultural institutions. It is also a means to gain competency with 3D technologies. 22

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As a branch of gaming technologies, augmented reality is described as a means to let users mash up real-world actions with digital information. One such example is the Nintendo Wii gaming system, which allows users to move their bodies to make the avatar act accordingly. Another example is Microsoft's Surface, a tabletop computer that lets users manipulate digital content with natural motions, such as hand gestures. The Gartner Group lists this as one of its top ten disruptive technologies and says that this sort of real-world-meets-virtual-reality mashup will become more common. 23 Social Networks. So much has been written about social networking and library 2.0 that it is surely not necessary to describe here what it is, but rather to consider its long term implications regarding service. Perhaps the most important issue is to consider how social networking is changing not only human behaviors but the convergence of different technologies with social networking. For example, as social networks move to the mobile platform, will they merely be ported over to a different platform, or will there be opportunities to do things differently in the mobile world that will make the social networks more robust? Perhaps the most important issue that is rarely discussed is whether we have witnessed a permanent change in the way that people work and communicate or whether some fatigue factor or backlash will eventually set in. Surely there will continue to be many (millions?) of people who will be anxious to use the Internet to share their knowledge, expertise and opinions through blogs, online reviews, and wikis. However, the lasting effects of social networks are far too early to predict. Will this be an overnight sensation that burns brightly for a decade or so and then peters out, or will it cause an everlasting change in the way the entire world operates?

Education and Learning Issues

How University Students Do Research. The University of Rochester commissioned a study that was conducted by Nancy Fried Foster, an anthropologist who spent two years at the University working among students. 24 The study, An Anthropologist in the Library: The University of Rochester, takes a close look at students in the stacks. Foster was hired by the library to shed light on how undergraduate students do their research and write papers and how they spend their days. The researchers stress that results apply to Rochester a private, competitive, residential university in the United States and to undergraduate students only. Nonetheless, the findings are interesting, and the model of using anthropological research techniques to determine how students (or faculty) do their work is an important idea. The results of this study guided a library renovation, a web-site redesign, and the library marketing campaign. It also changed the image of undergraduates in the eyes of librarians. Some of the key findings: The Net Generation is not hard-wired for technology. "There is not a big technophile-technophobe division (between students and faculty). There are still significant numbers of students who are completely inept with technology. The Net Generation students may be multi-taskers, but they come to the library to unplug because they still need time to concentrate and focus intensively. Soon after getting an assignment, many students called parents to ask what they should write about or later to edit their work. Many students are compulsive overachievers with heavily scheduled days, so the only free time they have is at night, which is when they often began their homework. Assessment and Accreditation. Whether for primary, secondary or higher education, there is a profound movement toward the creation and measurement of greater outcomes-based results through assessment and accreditation. Increasingly, it is important to document how public or institutional funds are being used to generate meaningful results that are commensurate with the investment made to generate those results. In higher education, the U.S. Department of Education is pressing regional accreditation agencies to develop standardized tests to demonstrate student proficiencies. The Future of Education. The world of education, and higher education in particular, has never been known to adjust to changing times with great speed. Nonetheless, significant changes are beginning to occur. To name but a few, the open movement, is burgeoning, not only in open access and open source software, but also in open courseware and textbooks. Clearly collaborative learning continues to expand, beginning in primary grades, but going well beyond to include higher education, both at the undergraduate and graduate levels.

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Information Content Issues

Chris Anderson: Everything is Free. 25 Chris Anderson, the man who brought us the long tail, is back with a new theory that he published recently in Wired and which he will expand into a book that will be published in 2009. In brief, Anderson submits that a decade and a half into the great online experiment, the last debates over free versus pay online are ending, and that every industry that becomes digital eventually becomes free. He notes that In 2007 The New York Times [archives] went free; this year, so will much of The Wall Street Journal. This calls to mind one version of Stewart Brand's original aphorism from 1984: Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive ... That tension will not go away. Among the reasons causing this shift are decreasing costs of storage (Yahoo Mail), bandwidth (YouTube: free), and processing (Google: free) are in the race to the bottom, and the result is that the cost of doing business online points to zero. When operating in web scale, Anderson believes that it is possible to attract the greatest number of users for centralized resources by spreading costs over larger audiences. He asserts that anything that touches digital networks quickly feels the effect of falling costs. Google is an example of the model, as are open source software, social networking applications, and user-generated content (such as Wikipedia), all of which lead to free labor created and consumed with no expectation of payment. However, even Anderson recognizes that everything is not, indeed, free. In fact, many things will be paid for by user fees for services (or premium services). For example, low-cost digital distribution may lead to no admission fee at the movie theater, but theaters will make money from concessions and sale of premium movie-going experiences. This will be a cultural shift in more ways than one. Anderson points out that An entire generation of computer professionals had been taught that their job was to dole out expensive computer resources sparingly. However, there is no longer the need to conserve in that way. Computing power is not absolutely free, but it is cheap enough to be disregarded. Yet, the difference between cheap and free is what venture capitalist Josh Kopelman calls the "penny gap." [T]he truth is that zero is one market and any other price is another. In many cases, that's the difference between a great market and none at all. Universities Expanding Their Adoption of E-books. In a recent study by the Primary Research Group, 69% of university research libraries indicated that they plan to increase spending on e-books over the next two years. 26 The results were based on a survey 75 academic, public and special libraries in countries around the world, including the United States, Canada, Australia, Germany, and Japan. This represents a significant shift in a short period of time given that only a year and a half ago other reports indicated that that e-books were not yet ready for the campus environment. According to the press release and excerpted materials available from Primary Research, other findings of the study include: 27

Spending. E-book spending by libraries is growing rapidly in 2008 but by significantly less than in 2007. Libraries in the sample expected to renew over 77% of their current contracts for e-books. Nearly 70% of e-book spending was with aggregators, with 24.6% of total spending with individual publishers. Specific materials. More than half of all library users reported either extensive or significant use of e-reference books, and nearly a quarter of college libraries reported use as quite extensive. How-to books were used occasionally by about 37% of the libraries, and non-U.S. libraries reported higher use than did U.S.-based libraries. Business books were among the most popular e-books, with nearly 23% of the libraries reporting quite extensive use and another 23% reporting significant use. Non-U.S. libraries reported even heavier use. Fiction e-books were not used extensively, with 71% saying that they were used little, and fewer than 10% reporting extensive or significant. Cataloging. Non-U.S. libraries had MARC records provided by vendors for more than 78% of their e-book holdings. Over 81% of the sample cataloged their e-books and listed them in their online catalogs. The libraries in the sample had MARC records for about 74% of the e-books in their collections. Many of the libraries with the smallest budgets did not have MARC records for their e-books. Information literacy. Nearly half the librarians rated the skills of their users as being less skillful in using e-books than other major e-journal databases, and another half said the skills were about the same. The non-U.S. population rated only 31% as less skillful, while 53% of U.S. librarians rated their users as less skillful. Use by discipline. Use of e-books in the hard sciences (chemistry, physics and biology) was particularly high, with more than 30% of participants saying that this use of e-books was quite extensive and another 26% noted significant use. Redundancy in print. A print version was maintained by 24% of the reporting libraries.

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Use in course reserves. E-books account for only about 3.9% of the books on course reserve (also known as short loans), with a range of 0 to 30%. Availability of non-commercial e-books. 45% of the libraries in the sample said that they make special efforts to help users reach assessable free e-book sites such as Project Gutenberg. Nearly 21% of the libraries have digitized out-of-copyright books in their collections and make their contents more available to their patrons. E-book statistics. Nearly 80% of libraries said that they used them only occasionally or that they were little used, and only 8% said that they were used quite extensively. E-book readers. The percentage of libraries that own any kind of e-book reading device, not including computer workstations, is very low only 10%. The U.S. ownership (10.64%) is very similar to the non-U.S. ownership (8.33%). Ironically, except for libraries with the very smallest budgets, there is an inverse relationship between library budgets and percentage of ownership, with only 6.7% of those with budgets exceeding $4 million (USD) owning readers, while ownership was 14.2% with budgets between $300,000 and $1.5 million. Ownership of the Amazon Kindle in particular was only 4.0%

Another recent study supports some of these conclusions about the potential growth of e-books. Ebrary, an aggregator of ebooks, commissioned a study that surveyed 150 college and university libraries throughout the world. 28 While 49% of the respondents overall reported that they never use e-books, and another 28% use e-books less than one hour per week, the use rate is actually higher outside the U.S. than inside. The major reasons for non-use are that students dont know where to find the books (57%) and they prefer printed books (45%). The most important features of e-books are the ability to download the text to a laptop, to copy and paste text, to print, and to highlight text. Neither of these studies distinguishes very much between e-reference books versus monographs or trade books. It is also important to watch the development of different e-book reader technologies. In some countries, standard mobile phones are used to read whole novels, and the iPhone seems well-positioned to move into that market. Specialized e-ink based readers, such as the Sony eReader and the Amazon Kindle, are gaining some traction, and the next generation of readers have screens that can be folded or scrolled. For the first time, trade and commercial publishers are making the substantial portion of their front stock available for these specialized readers, and they are also realizing long tail sales of back stock. Greater adoption can be expected as the technology advances and the price for specialized readers continues to drop. Digital Book Projects. As e-books gain ground, projects to digitize books owned by libraries continue to be a mixed picture. Google continues to gain new participants in its book scanning project, but concerns remain about restrictions that Google places on these digital images. Most recently, Microsoft announced that it is abandoning its book digitization project and that it is turning over the already-scanned digital copies of those books to the home institutions. The Open Content Alliance continues to make headway, but the funding for most of its digitization efforts comes either through limited grants or from the libraries themselves. Nonetheless, interest in, the value of, and the desire for book digitization remain extremely high, and it is clearly a trend that is likely to increase. Peer Production. In the July 2006 issue, Chris Anderson in Wired named peer production as one of the top six trends that are changing the world. Since then, everything from Wikipedia, Flickr, Facebook, and political blogs to tagging sites and virtual libraries (such as Shelfari) have boomed with content that is being generated constantly by amateurs who do their work for free, which is having a profound impact as to what is available to libraries and how the publishing industry will rework itself in future. There is ample evidence that peer production is now affecting commercial enterprises, and not just in the individual contribution to sites such as Amazon. For example, Encyclopedia Britannica recently announced that as a complement to the tightly-edited entries, it will create a function to allow the user community to contribute articles. These new articles will be clearly marked and run alongside the edited reference pieces. EB explained that readers and users will also be invited into an online community where they can work and publish at Britannicas site under their own names. The core encyclopedia itself will continue to be edited according to the most rigorous standards and will bear the imprimatur Britannica Checked to distinguish it from material on the site for which Britannica editors are not responsible. 29 In a related development, Jimmy Wales noted that Wikipedia entries have become more detailed, more accurate, hopefully better written, fleshed out more, with more references and more citations. Over time the community has gotten more and more rigorous about sourcing. He also noted that a new feature of the German Wikipedia is a "flag revisions" feature that

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allows the community to flag a particular version of an article to show that the article has been vetted. Wikipedia will still allow further editing, but if you really wanted one that as of three months ago we had three Ph.D. s look at it, and they checked it off as being good, you could see that. The flagged versions could be cited more comfortably by an academic. Consideration is also being given to extend this feature to other Wikipedia editions, including the one in English. 30

Library Leadership and Organization Issues

Transition Libraries from a Collection to Service Orientation. The role of libraries continues to change from serving largely as asset managers to becoming advocates for access and action. Librarians are increasingly seeking to become embedded in the faculty and student research processes, and librarians are often the primary advocates on their campus for open access, changes in intellectual property management, and institutional and digital repositories. As libraries take on these roles, it raises a number of key issues, including the development of new resources, the reallocation of current resources, recruiting and retraining professionals who can take on these new roles, and effectively advocating for new library programs and projects. These issues combine to create key library leadership issues for achieving appropriate and acceptable rates of organizational change. For libraries to be better prepared to accept these challenges, they need better skills in strategic and tactical planning and in the assessment of the quality of their services. To do so, they need to understand how to employ planning tools such as scenario planning, organizational dashboards, statistics, survey research, and focus groups. The Library as Space and the Virtual Library. An important consideration for library service will be concerning the policies for physical library collections, making web access more efficient and effective, and redesigning the physical library space so that space is more responsive to the needs of the user community. The library as space whether for academic or public librarieswill continue to have relevance in a virtual world. The library is a place for research, for quiet study, for collaborative investigation, for the use of technologies that might otherwise be unavailable for users, and as a social space for large and small group activities. Much can also be said of the virtual world. The challenge will be to align the presentation of services in these two different environments so these experiences are complementary while maximizing the unique inherent benefits of each separate environment. In both environments there must be active service spaces, transitional spaces (such as informal places to work or gather together, whether in a physical lounge or online chat space or virtual reality), blended spaces to mix relaxation and formal work spaces, and quiet spaces for individual study, reflection or investigation. In both environments, careful consideration must be given as to how to employ technology effectively. The leadership opportunity will be to ensure strong IT support and provide for numerous and powerful workstations and ubiquitous WiFi in the physical space and to create institutional and community digital repositories in the virtual space that enable the creation and sharing of content and provide effective discovery and use systems. The alignment of the two types of spaces can be envisioned as in the table below. Goal Ease of access Ease of use Collaboration enabled Places to relax Support instruction Technology- friendly Physical Too many walls? Movable furniture? Sufficient collaborative space? Is there a caf? Instructional spaces provided? Sufficient WiFi and electricity? Virtual Too many clicks? Access too structured? Not well organized? Are there any online collaborative tools? Any entertainment to keep users engaged? Any education or course-related materials? Does the web site advance the library?

NELINET. All rights reserved. 2008

Discussion Questions
Questions developed by Stephen Spohn, NELINET Senior Consultant for Library Planning and Assessment Societal and Economic Issues What services changes will be necessary to engage younger users who often prefer online forms of interactions? How will rising costs affect in-person and remote use of the library, its resources and its services? Technology Issues What protections should the library provide to ensure the privacy of library users? What online tools should the library offer other than resources that are available from commercial sources? What changes should be made to the library web site or information portal? For example, what could or should library widgets look like? What current policies are outdated concerning the use of technology in the library? Education and Learning Issues How can the library measure the impact of its services on student learning? On faculty research? On community users? What is or should be the relationship between the quality of library services, its impact upon its users, and its revenue? Information Content Issues What copyright compliance and intellectual property issues will face the library in an evolving environment? In response to those changes, what advocacy should the library engage in, and what policies should it adopt? What should the librarys collection policies be regarding e-books going forward? Library Leadership and Organization Issues What changes to the library facilities should be undertaken over the next three to five years? What does the library wish to accomplish with its online presence, and what changes are needed to accomplish these goals (e.g., changes to the web site, RSS feeds, blogs, wikis, etc.)?

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ENDNOTES
1

Arnold Hirshon. "Vision, Focus, and Technology in Academic Research Libraries: 1971 to 2001." Advances in Library Automation and Networking, v.2. (Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 1988): 215-257. Available at http://www.nelinet.net/ahirshon/public/vision.pdf Paul Saffo. Six Rules for Effective Forecasting. Harvard Business Review (June 2007).

2 3

John Tierney. The Future Is Now? Pretty Soon, at Least. New York Times (June 3, 2008) http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/03/science/03tier.html?8dpc=&pagewanted=print Various sources, including http://www.forrester.com/Research/Document/Excerpt/0,7211,43977,00.html

http://www.forrester.com/Research/Document/Excerpt/0,7211,43647,00.html http://www.forrester.com/Research/Document/Excerpt/0,7211,43150,00.html Tamara J. Erickson. Task, Not Time: HBR Breakthrough Ideas for 2008. February 2008: 19 John Seeley Brown and Douglas Thomas. The Gamer Disposition. Harvard Business Review, February 2008: 28 Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future. (London: British Library and JISC, January 2008). Executive summary at http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/reppres/gg_final_keynote_11012008.pdf
6 7 5

http://www.privacyrights.org/ar/ChronDataBreaches.htm

Declan McCullagh. How search engines rate on privacy. CNet http://news.com.com/How+search+engines+rate+on+privacy/2100-1029_3-6202068.html (summary) http://news.com.com/In+their+own+words+Search+engines+on+privacy/2100-1029_3-6202047.html (full survey) http://searchengineland.com/080222-083116.php http://scobleizer.com/2007/08/24/seagate-making-headlines-over-flash-memory/ http://www-01.ibm.com/software/success/cssdb.nsf/CS/JRDS-7DJJEC?OpenDocument&Site=

8 9

10 11

For an example of a 360 degree high definition view of the Piazza San Marco in Venice, go to http://labs.live.com/photosynth/view.html?collection=sanmarco/index/1.sxs For a live, interactive example of a 16 gigapixel image of DaVincis The Last Supper, which was photographed in 1,677 separate images, go to http://www.haltadefinizione.com/en/
13 14 12

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Messaging-and-Collaboration/10-Most-Disruptive-Technologies

One Laptop per Child isn't just for children anymore. Andy Jordan talks to adults who can't wait to get their hands on the "unbelievably sexy" machines. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121458969827311273.html?mod=djemPJ Victoria Shannon. Social Networking Moves to the Cellphone. New York Times (March 6, 2008) http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/06/technology/06wireless.html?ref=technology
16 17 18 19 15

http://blog.changewave.com/2008/07/apple_3g_iphone.html http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601213&sid=aNLhDW3mFvjo&refer=home http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/02/14/google_iphone_usage_shocks_search_giant.html

Don Clark. Chip Makers Put Rush on Mobile Gadgets Pocket-Size Devices Being Pushed by Intel Spark Product Scramble. Wall Street Journal (June 2, 2008: B6) http://online.wsj.com/article_print/SB121236957070436679.html

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20 21 22

Jane MacGonigal. Making Alternate Reality the New Business Reality. Harvard Business Review (February 2008: 29). Judith Donath. Giving Avatars Emote Control. Harvard Business Review (February 2008: 31)

Jeffrey R. Young. Colleges Are Building in Second Life, but Is Anyone Visiting? August 16, 2007 http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=2307?=atwc
23 24 25

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Messaging-and-Collaboration/10-Most-Disruptive-Technologies/ http://chronicle.com/weekly/v53/i50/50a02601.htm

Chris Anderson. Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business. Wired Magazine 16.03. (February 25, 2008) http://www.wired.com/print/techbiz/it/magazine/16-03/ff_free
26 27

http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/article/3047/research-libraries-embracing-e-books?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

http://www.primaryresearch.com/release-200805241.html and http://www.primaryresearch.com/200804281-Libraries-Information-Science-excerpt.html

28

http://www.responsetrack.net/lnk/surveymonkey888307/?14C2107RED4"http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=V6KfjUjiRPtGy JYmHINDRg_3d_3d Josh Fischman. Encyclopaedia Britannica Goes - Gasp! Wiki. Chronicle of Higher Education (June 6, 2008). http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/article/3064/encyclopedia-britannica-goes-gasp-wiki?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en Jeffrey R. Young. Wikipedia's Co-Founder Wants to Make It More Useful to Academe. Chronicle of Higher Education (June 13, 2008). http://chronicle.com/weekly/v54/i40/40a01801.htm
30 29

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Wiki Version of Enviromental Scan

This scan is also available online as a wiki so that you and your staff can work together with us at NELINET to update and expand this scan on a continuous basis. The wiki version is available at: http://neliwiki.nelinet.net/wiki/Environmental_Scan Once you create your own username and password you and your staff can read, print, update, or add to the scan. For questions about the wiki, please contact Stephen Spohn at spohn@nelinet.net.