According to Library Journal's, "Top Tech Trends Panel Enlightens Despite Technology Troubles" the Top Tech Trends Panel at ALA discussed the new trends but also the technology speed bumps to we might encounter. I found the article to be interesting to read but of course I couldn't help thinking about how medical and hospital libraries fit into the equation.

There is a growing enthusiasm for open source within the ALA technology community. The article mentions several librarians who gave their opinions on open source in libraries including Karen Schneider who mentioned that librarians have come full circle from the earliest days of library software, and are back to writing and supporting their own code. I see open source as a great way to supplement our existing library systems, but I just don't see many medical librarians going back to writing their own systems and coding. Why? Many of your academic medical centers are a part of a larger university library system. Often the university library sets the tone for what is done with library wide systems (like the ILS). Most of your hospital librarians are in one or two person libraries where they don't have time and most likely the programming knowledge to start coding. In addition they have the double whammy of having to try and get it through hospital IT approval, which is a very different and difficult process compared to public or academic IT departments. That doesn't mean that I don't see open source affecting medical libraries. Au contraire, I see medical libraries benefiting from open source applications, I just see the majority of medical librarians as adopters and adapters of the technology rather than the creating the technology.

Of course bandwidth issues are being discussed in a lot of libraries, both public and medical. The difference however, is that medical libraries usually must rely upon the larger institution such as the hospital or university regarding bandwidth. Just because bandwidth issue is in most likely another department's problem, doesn't mean medical librarians can't be proactive in trying to work with their IT departments to address the issue. Many hospitals have a pretty tough policy on multimedia use on their computers because of bandwidth issues. However some hospital librarians have gotten some medically related multimedia sites (surgical videos, podcasts, etc.) exempt from the policy. Most can't download a surgical video from YouTube, but they can easily point to a site like AccessSurgery or NLM's Surgical Videos as necessary. As more of these legitimate educational sites become available, doctors, nurses and patients are going to want to use them and the bandwidth will need to be addressed. Simply blocking YouTube might buy IT some time but the bandwidth bug will come back. You can never have too much bandwidth.

With the release of the new iPhone and Sprint's Instinct, more people are starting to use mobile devices. I think medical librarians have been a little bit ahead of the game here. We have been looking at resources (online textbooks, databases, programs, etc) that work well on mobile devices for quite a while. It used to be residents were carrying around one of two "flavors" of mobile devices, Palm or PocketPC. Things have changed a little, not only have the devices changed but so have the users. A larger variety of users who in past most likely didn't own a PDA now are able to access and use resources from their iPhone or iClone.

As I mentioned it is always interesting to me to see what trends others in libraries are following and what it might mean for medical libraries. That is why I am always watching those in ALA and more specifically LITA. While I haven't found out how gaming fits into medical libraries, there are certainly plenty of other things out there that we could learn about and experiment with to see how or if it is applicable in our libraries.

Labels: Technology