Senior executives of library technology companies will answer questions from moderator Rob McGee of RMG as well as the audience. Smart Libraries Newsletter editor Marshall Breeding will weigh in as a special commentator along with RMG’s Geoff Payne. The companies and panelists expected this year are:

• Auto-Graphics,  Paul Cope

• ByWater Solutions,  Brendan Gallagher
• Ex Libris,  Matti Shem-Tov
• Infor,  Ann Melaerts
• Innovative Interfaces,  Neil Block
• OCLC,  Robin Murray
• Polaris,  Bill Schickling
• Serials Solutions/ProQuest,  Jane Burke
• SirsiDynix,  Bill Davison
• The Library Corporation (TLC),  Annette Murphy
• VTLS,  Vinod Chachra

McGee will solicit opinions on how library workflows must change with the shift from print to electronic resources, Patron-Driven Acquisitions (PDA)/Demand-Driven Acquisitions (DDA), e-Book Lending, Discovery Services with access to Open Content and pay-per-download of licensed content, the synergies and competition among the technology and content sectors of the library industry. He will also seek comments on the competive environment wth new web-scale library management system players and vendors supporting Open Source Integrated Library Systems going after the customers of established players.

RMG’s Presidents’ Seminar is a terrific opportunity to learn about the library technology marketplace. Even while executives strive to to stay on message with their competitive advantages, the open forum explores library technology trends and reveals how vendors are positioning themselves.

Below are the trends and topics that RMG has identified.

For a vendor in the saturated North American ILS marketplace, getting a new-name customer can mean snatching a library from somebody else’s ILS customer base – or selling it an add-on product or service.

Content increasingly rules, and cloud services have gathered; this combination challenges legacy library automation systems designed and created before the dominance of e-content and the Internet. Discovering, accessing, and delivering e-content is a compelling alternative (or complement) to a library’s investment in a traditional ILS package of standard modules – along with a tug in another strategic direction for the ROI (Return on Investment) in RFID/AMH (Automated Material Handling) systems for gains in customer services and staff performance in managing books and AV materials.

Industry dynamics in the last three years have been game-changers. Bywater Solutions, Equinox Software, and Liblime/PTFS have successfully commercialized the development and support of Open Source ILSs — Evergreen and Koha. ILSaaS (Integrated Library System as a Service, including the web-scale offerings) is flattening the costs of open source and proprietary ILSs. Baker & Taylor and 3M now offer e-book lending (circulation control) services. In June 2011 Serials Solutions announced a Web-Scale Management Solution to debut in 4Q 2012. These together with Ex Libris’ Alma, Kuali OLE, Innovative’s Sierra, and OCLC’s WMS offer opportunities for improved library workflows and customer services that overcome the costly inefficiency and awkwardness of differentiated processes for selection, acquisition, discovery, access, and delivery of e- and p-resources.

The pairing of ILS/Discovery by Ex Libris, Innovative, and OCLC has impacted the academic library sector. Discovery and delivery services that focus on public libraries and the e-resources provided by State Library agencies have yet to emerge in needed force to benefit millions of readers who go about public library use largely unaware of expensive licensed e-content that could be within easy reach for them with the right interfaces and services on laptops, phones, and tablets.

The biggest slices of library budgets are for people/content: in the extreme, 20/80 for academic libraries; 70/30 for public libraries. Annual expenditures for e-resources may reach 80% of some academic library content budgets. Targeting increased ROI in people and content is a strategic direction for libraries.

The sheer financial might of Baker & Taylor, OCLC, ProQuest/Serials Solutions, and 3M separates them from the traditional denizens of the ILS marketplace. That, coupled with their ability or potential to deliver e-content, discovery, and ILS services on a subscription basis just might be the forces that re-shape the library technology marketplace. Will 3M expand Cloud Library to include an ILS service; or will Baker & Taylor or EBSCO or Gale take the WMS-plunge? Remember Elsevier and Endeavor/Voyager?

Will the Invasion of the ILS Customer Snatchers be advanced through mergers and acquisitions (M&A) of library technology and/or content vendors?

Are we a step away from Amazon or Facebook or Google or Microsoft launching services that one-up Amazon’s recently introduced e-book lending services, that could partner or compete with libraries to reach individuals, homes, schools, and businesses?

Will Apple’s iCloud and Siri (think out of the single-search box) lead to Internet, Cable, and TV services that make information as easy to find and use, and as much fun and effective, as the iPhone and iPad?

ALA TechSource: Some public libraries are looking at ways they can be developers of content, helping people in their communities publish content of interest to their communities. The “hyper-local” approach. Drawing from your knowledge of start-up publishing platforms, what opportunities do you see for libraries?

Joe Wikert: Just as publishers are being forced to reinvent themselves in the digital age I think it’s important for libraries to do the same. Part of that means being prepared to completely abandon any/all of the services you provided before. I like the thought of libraries helping their patrons learn how to effectively develop content, but it shouldn’t end there. I think they should also serve as a resource to help them distribute that content. This is a big hole that’s missing in the self-publishing space, and libraries have an opportunity to step in and do something about it. Authors who want to self-publish are scratching their heads over which platform to use (e.g., Lulu, AuthorHouse, etc.) Wouldn’t it be great if your local library morphed into a resource that helps authors figure that out? And let’s not forget about the workshop opportunities that could result from this. Local libraries could have regular sessions covering all aspects of content authoring and distribution (e.g., contracts, rights, writing skills, hiring an editor, cover design, etc.) Thanks to the self-publishing phenomenon we’re seeing a lot more people get into the area of content creation and libraries are well-suited to play an important role in it.

ALA TechSource: What is your perspective on the state of social reading? Some libraries are using Goodreads for book clubs, for example. Do you think startup social media platforms might be useful tool for public libraries?

Joe Wikert: I see three issues currently with social reading. First, prospective users need to be convinced there’s a reason for it. There’s a lot of skepticism out there. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard someone say, “reading is a solitary activity…I don’t want it to be social!” There’s no question that a great deal of anyone’s reading should be out of the social sphere, but what about the rest of their reading activity? There are plenty of times when I’m reading a book about WWII where I’d like to ask someone what they might know about a certain battle or leader. I’d love to be able to ask that question right within the book I’m reading and not be forced to hop out to a browser and search Wikipedia, for example. At other times I’d love to ask someone else who’s reading the same book for clarification on something. Nothing beats being able to ask a classmate for help with a problem and the same applies to reading a book. I’m convinced social has a role in reading but we’re not there yet. Second, there are too many option. Do I go with Goodreads, as you suggest or Librarything, for example? I’ve used both and there are plenty of other ones out there. Finally, one of the biggest obstacles I see with social reading now is that it’s not built into the ereader app. I read a lot on my Kindle and for me to really engage with social activities while reading I’d need it to be built into the app or device.

ALA TechSource: O’Reilly publishes its ebooks without digital rights management (DRM) and offers subscriptions to a collection (including other publishers’ books) in the Safari Books Online. Can you offer a general perspective on this model, its rationale, and results? As a publisher, what’s your view of the library marketplace?

Joe Wikert: First of all, I love the library marketplace. As I noted earlier, I think this is a great opportunity for libraries to reinvent themselves and I truly hope they succeed in doing so. Regarding DRM and the Safari model, I’m obviously a big fan of no DRM and digital content subscriptions.

Publishers who are using DRM are saying they don’t trust their customers. What an awful message to send. And let’s not forget that a DRM model that can’t be cracked has yet to be built. DRM is nothing more than false security. Look around at all the ebooks available on torrent sites. Most of them were originally “protected” with DRM. Many others were never even officially released as ebooks but someone took the time to scan in the print version and create an e-version. So even if an uncrackable DRM could be developed, and it can’t, illegal ebooks would exist thanks to simple scanning technologies. Given all this, why should publishers use DRM? Not only does it say they don’t trust their customers but they have to pay extra for the feature and they limit what the customer can do with that content. What an awful formula. I’m sure you now see why I think DRM needs to completely go away!

Safari is a great model for content subscription. It’s mostly based on technology and business content but I could see the same model being successful for other genres too. Amazon is testing this out with their Kindle Owner’s Lending Library program. It’s a great deal for Amazon and their customers but an awful one for publishers and authors. Why? Amazon has acknowledged in their own press release about the service that they’re paying most publishers a simple flat fee for use of their content. So regardless of how popular a given book is in the program that publisher/author’s income is capped. I’m as opposed to revenue and royalty caps as I am to DRM. Amazon’s model should be like Safari’s, which is a pay-for-performance one. The more use a particular book gets the more income that publisher/author receives. It’s uncapped, like it should be.

Note: The O’Reilly Radar blog recently posted on web discussions around the mertis of publishers’ DRM srategies and the possible threat of being beholden to Amazon. See also Joe’s post “The problem with Amazon’s Kindle Owners’ Lending Library.” and his Joe Wikert’s Publishing 2020 Blog.

Welcome! I’ve been blogging about research progress towards making compound semiconductors mainstream and talking about both challenges and opportunities. Three IEDM 2011 papers show the latest progress so in this installment I’ll talk about the papers and how they relate to our challenges.

First as a reminder, unlike silicon, a compound semiconductor is made up of two or more elements, indium, gallium and arsenic for example (InGaAs). The key advantage of these materials is high charge mobility. Mobility is a measure of how easily you can move charges within the material with application of an electric field. Higher mobility can produce faster devices and/or devices that require much less power. Using two or more elements means more opportunity to tune the materials for performance or optical properties but also makes the challenge of fabricating wafers and processing much more complicated. Today, compound semiconductors are used in smaller scale applications where their special properties outweigh the added costs. Our goal is to take advantage of the vastly larger spending on silicon infrastructure and put it to use fabricating compound semiconductor devices.

Let’s look at how a generic transistor behaves over a range of control voltages in figure 1. On the left I’ve plotted the current on a linear scale while on the right I’ve used a logarithmic scale. Since a modern transistor can have a current ratio in the range 10,000 to 100,000, you can see why it is tough to see both on the same scale. The plot on left is best to understand how the device turns on while the right shows what happens as the device turns off. In the real world, better on state performance leads to higher switching speeds and thus more potential computations per second. Better off state means the stand-by state doesn’t run down your battery.

Fig 1: Device behavior can be plotted on a linear scale to examine turn-on behavior or on a logarithmic scale to examine turn-off behavior.

A physically short device has lower internal resistance so typically turns on faster but also is harder to completely turn off, thus it can have a poorer on-off ratio. Device engineers use multiple figures of merit but for this blog I will only focus on subthreshold swing (SS). SS is defined as the amount of voltage required to swing the off current by a factor of 10x and it is the inverse of the subthreshold slope shown in figure 1. An ideal device at room temperature will have SS=60mV per decade. Extra leakage paths and low coupling will raise SS and a poor device might have SS>150 for short dimensions. It doesn’t seem like much but that difference can lead to orders of magnitude difference in leakage power.

We have been working to optimize our compound semiconductor devices to both reduce parasitic effects and to increase the coupling by creating a trigate structure. In the first IEDM 2011 paper we show that an optimized III-V trigate device can have a much better SS than the equivalent planar device at short dimensions. A trigate device out performs in SS even with a trigate fin width of 30nm versus the 10nm thin body planar device. We are not yet at a point to claim both better and smaller compared with the best silicon trigate but we’re now one step closer.

In my last blog I talked about how a tunnel FET (TFET) might perform better under lower operating voltages because it has a steeper current cutoff (fig 2). In other words SS is lower, though in the case of a TFET it is not a straight line on a log scale.

Fig 2: Two modeled InAs double gate TFET configurations show very different turn-off behavior compared to the scaled CMOS device.

Our second IEDM paper is experimental work on III-V tunnel FET (TFET) devices. We show that we can achieve lower SS over part of the voltage range compared to the same thin body planar and for some of the operating range achieve steeper than 60 for SS. Again we’re not yet able to claim better than silicon but one step closer.

Fig 3. Cross-section of a single gate III-V tunnel FET. Gate is formed down the left side of the structure.

Our final paper which is unrelated to the other two looks at potential manufacturing techniques. Forming these devices requires precise growth of multiple crystalline layers using different materials. Most of our work to date has used Molecular Beam Epitaxy (MBE) which excels at fine control but has a very slow rate of deposition. We are currently evaluating Metallorganic Vapor Phase Epitaxy (MOVPE) as an alternative and we report that we can achieve equivalent mobility. Given that it is both faster and potentially opens up choices for selective deposition, this work establishes viability of MOVPE for the future.

Wrapping up, integration and optimization is about controlling many small details. It takes very few impurities to create leakage paths and as we move to very small dimensions, optimizing the design of the structure and the engineering of the interfaces becomes critical. We have years of practice on silicon so even when a non-silicon material starts out with an inherent advantage, a lot of invention is required to catch up. Research is continuing in order to make compound semiconductors with superior power-performance compared to the best silicon can offer today.

References:

1. Electrostatics Improvement in 3-D Tri-gate Over Ultra-Thin Body Planar InGaAs Quantum Well Field Effect Transistors with High-K Gate Dielectric and Scaled Gate-to-Drain/Gate-to-Source Separation, M. Radosavljevic et al., IEDM 2011.
2. Fabrication, Characterization, and Physics of III-V Heterojunction Tunneling Field Effect Transistors (H-TFET) for Steep Sub-Threshold Swing, G. Dewey et al., IEDM 2011.
3. MOVPE III-V Material Growth on Silicon Substrates and its Comparison to MBE for Future High Performance and Low Power Logic Applications, N. Mukherjee et al. IEDM 2011.

A very good survey paper of III-V opportunities and challenges:

Nanometre-scale electronics with III-V compound semiconductors, Jesús A. del Alamo, Vol 479, Nature, Nov 17, 2011

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Technology@Intel

I recently took on a new role that put me in closer touch with countries where technology in education has moved high up on the political agenda. Not all that long ago, governments were asking, “Why should we do this?” and “How do we do this?” Today, a number of countries are recognizing that ensuring that every student has access to computer and the internet is a key to being economically competitive — locally, regionally and globally. These countries are pioneers in ensuring all young people have ubiquitous the ability to develop 21st century skills at an early age.

My new role has given me a deeper understanding of some of the challenges of making a technical infrastructure work seamlessly in lots of different environments. And seamless is important, because you’re not going to get great use of technology in schools unless teachers and students have real access that’s real easy.

But easy is hard. It’s not just about adding technology on top of what you already do. It’s about changing school cultural and teachers’ behavior. It means thinking about instruction in transformative ways to keep pace with the information age. In an ideal world, you’d change the entire educational system at once. You’d deploy computers along with amazing new digital resources, new learning standards, revised testing methods, new approaches to teacher professional development. In the real world — and especially the developing world — you can’t let perfect get in the way of good enough. The leading countries are not letting the goal of perfect hold them back from making progress.

Here’s one thing I’ve observed: When you see large deployments of netbooks in schools, you often find visionary leaders driving those projects. For example, consider Alicia Bañuelos from the Universidad de La Punta in San Luis, Argentina. Alicia is an important leader in the state of San Luis’s effort to provide a netbook to every student in their province. It has taken tremendous effort for this poor rural state to give each student access to a device and the internet and one that Alicia acknowledges has sometime fallen short of ideal. “It’s not going to be perfect. But the only way I know to bootstrap my struggling rural economy into the information age and become globally competitive is through a strong workforce and a great infrastructure to the Internet. It’s worth me taking the risk to make it happen.”

Deployments like these points to a promising trend: Affordable netbooks based on our Intel® Atom™ architecture are opening up a whole new opportunity for governments to invest in another segment of education. Until recently, many countries focused more on integrating technology in higher education and secondary schools, with an emphasis on job skills training and workforce development. Today, affordability of technology and the performance of Atom-based netbooks allow even countries with limited budgets to consider the transformative potential of technology in primary grades. Countries like Macedonia, Georgia and Portugal are not just putting technology into schools but also looking at broadband connectivity to the internet, digitizing their curriculum, and training their teachers to fully take advantage of the devices in schools.

There is a common theme in our conversations with governments around the world. They know that to compete in an information economy, they need to start developing a knowledge-based citizenry much earlier. Our students have to be able to learn how to learn, to think critically and to collaborate across cultures. Having those skills — and the opportunity to practice them — is particularly important in developing countries, where students often leave the education system at younger ages.

• Read more about Intel’s deployments of netbooks in education on Intel’s website.

• Policymakers seeking to create a technology plan for their school system can download a free e-book to help with their planning at the Tech & Learning Website.

• Educators considering the move to a 1:1 computing model can find resources to help at the K-12 Computing Blueprint.

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Technology@Intel

How LCD Technology works?

Crystals are mainly used to procure images on the screen. These crystals are aligned in two ways. It can produce images on the screen by passing lights through them or by blocking it. It uses a light source behind the screen. This light shines with the support of LCD panel. While the pixels receive power supply, they light or shine. Thus this LCD technology produces images on the screen.

What are the advantages of LCD Technology?

1. This widely popular technology has the ability to offer stunning images on the screen.
2. They are designed as a slim unit.
3. The weight of LCD televisions is comparatively less than the plasma televisions.
4. It never consumes huge power like other display technologies.
5. It has come with extended lifespan.
6. The users can easily replace those LCD televisions.
7. LCD screen can also be used as a PC display.

Some arguments against LCD Televisions

1. You cannot expect high level contrasts in this LCD technology.
2. The viewing angle of the LCD TV is restricted.
3. The colour displays will be dull in LCD televisions.
4. Most of the dead pixels will be scattered around your screen. When a pixel does not work, it is known as dead pixels.
5. It has marketed with high price tag.

Features to be included in an ideal LCD Television

1. Viewing angle is an essential which has to be considered when you go for shopping.
2. If you are interested to get High Definition programs in your LCD TV, you have to get digital video input.
3. Check the contrast feature to view pictures clearly.
4. When you want to get bright colour images on the screen, it is better to have adequate brightness features.
5. It is advisable to choose medium size LCD television.
6. Try to get the advantage of Picture In Picture (PIP), to watch two images in a single screen.
7. High end models of LCD televisions have come with mountable feature.

Read JVC LCD Television Reviews, LG LCD TV reviews and exclusive articles on LCD Vs Plasma Technology in lcdtvreviews website.

ScriptDebate.com

Latest Technology Trends

ASP -Application Service Provider
SaaS – Software as a Service
PaaS –Platform as a Service

A recent legal conference included a panel discussion about Cloud legal issues, however not once did the panel ever refer to any of these prior names, and in fact the panel members acted as if the technology and legal issues included in the Cloud Computing were something new. In fact the technology and legal issues are really very old news!

What is different about Cloud Computing is that all the Internet powerhouse players offer Cloud Computing services including IBM, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Salesforce, and many more.
 

Vogel Internet, Information Technology and e-Discovery Blog

Students did not think their competency with core technology was sufficient and they wanted to learn more specialized technology skills.

This might be classified under the more you know the more you know you don’t know. It struck me that these students, who are connected all the time and own on average twelve technology devices, know that there is quite a lot they still need to learn. This is a golden opportunity for librarians to step forward and offer technology training tailored to meet the specific needs of our subject areas. Things that were mentioned specifically included eportfolios, audio and presentation tools, subject specific software, video creation, and programming languages.

Instructors are not using technology well and are missing opportunities to inspire and create responsive learning environments.

These findings here were heartbreaking to me, but not surprising:

• Less than 25% of students think their institution uses technology effectively, frequently, and seamlessly.
• Over 50% of students feel they know more about technology than their instructors.
• 31% of students say that instructors require student help to get technology working in the classroom.

In the survey, students practically begged for something other than PowerPoint. One student said, “Something, anything, to make it more enjoyable to learn would be wonderful.” Instructors are using technology, but still using it to deliver lectures instead of integrating it into the learning process to enrich the experience. The survey found that even minimal technology in a lecture style class, when used to enhance learning, greatly increased a student’s positive perception of the class. We have to start thinking outside of the lecture box and start teaching in meaningful ways.

Fifty-seven percent of students use ebooks or etextbooks.

Read that line again: 57%. The national average for adult ereader ownership was only at 15% last month. I know use does not correlate to ereader ownership. There are a lot of ways to read ebooks, but 31% of students wanted instructors to use more ebooks. Librarians are tired of hearing about ebooks because professionally we do not know how to handle them, yet. While we are grappling with the what and how of ebooks, the demand is growing exponentially.

Access, effective use, and knowledge level of technology among students, instructors, and institutions is directly correlated to the Carnegie Classification of the institution.

This is one of the least surprising findings of the study, but it does expose the growing digital divide. Institutions granting Associate degrees offer less technology to their communities who in turn have a lower competency rate than students and instructors at four year colleges. Technology may be more pervasive and cheaper than ever before, but lower income students still own less technology and attend colleges with less access to technology than students in higher socioeconomic groups. The digital divide continues into our classrooms. Students who start out on the bottom of the scale become workers who have not been exposed to as much technology as their peers when they enter the workforce.

Students still find great value in face to face learning.

We should not underestimate what the ability to attend a class in person adds to the learning experience. Students responded that they preferred classes with both in person and online components. Classes taught solely online will never live up to the f2f standard until we learn to effectively inspire and create learning environments online. To do this, we have to stop treating online venues like lecture halls.

At the end of the report, ECAR includes some very good recommendations and comments about the responses in the survey. They point out that students went “out of their way” to add comments which indicated that they wanted more “unconventional uses of technology.” ECAR postulated that more students would ask for wider and more creative technology use, but the students have never seen this modeled in acdemia. Most students do not ask because they do not know what is possible.

As we all know, there are some great instructors who are striving to use technology in new ways, breaking out of the mold to create learning environments that inspire students to create and learn. They use Twitter to spark discussions in and out of class. They abandon Blackboard for WordPress. They give students the freedom to create their own content through media.

As librarians, we should support our instructors as they seek new ways of reaching students. We can do this by modeling good technology use in our libraries, offering training for instructors, and being a support network when they need it. For students, we can work with departments to create new training for students in subject specific technology areas and we can offer spaces for the training to happen. Many of our libraries have a wealth of technology knowledge in our staff. It is time we put it to good use.

Until recently, when it came to exposure from online fraud, most people only worried about the protection of their online financial accounts. These accounts have been big targets for fraud as evidence by the thousands of phishing sites produced each month targeting financial institutions. While the threat of a compromised account can be a huge concern for the general consumer, liability in security incidents has traditionally landed on financial institutions, which are expected to protect their customers.

Today, though, responsibility is less clear. Fraudsters have found that by leveraging trust between online parties they can proliferate malware an incredibly fast rate. As people accumulate hundreds of trusted “friends” on social networking sites, fraudsters are targeting these accounts to spread malware downloads and send spam or targeted phishing emails. Moreover, with mass storage now readily available through consumer email service providers, more people are keeping valuable private information in their inboxes (think: mortgage applications!), which can provide data to fraudsters to perform identity theft. Throw in online gaming with millions of dollars of value in virtual goods and it is easy to see why fraud is booming.

The problem is: usernames and passwords (especially weak passwords and ones used at multiple accounts) do not provide ample protection. They are being phished, socially engineered, guessed or stolen at astonishing rates- to the point where most people have had or know someone who has had an account hijacked and used for malicious intent. What is needed is a way to more clearly tie a user’s identity to a trusted device, much as credit cards with personal photos provide an extra way to identify you when the card is presented to a retailer.

One popular way businesses do this today is to use physical, “two factor authentication” tokens. These are credit card-sized devices that combine something you know, your username and password, with something you have, a randomly generated code created in the token, that you input at a site to gain access. The tokens are used by many Fortune 500 companies to give employees, partners and vendors access to corporate network resources. The trouble with this approach is that there is a certain level of expense involved to maintain the system, and if the algorithms behind the tokens are ever compromised, it can take months to recode and replace them.

To address these challenges, Intel worked with other industry thought leaders to embed two-factor authentication in computer chip hardware, a security approach that promises to be more seamless for end users and more cost effective for organizations. This new technology is called Intel® Identity Protection Technology (IPT) Here’s how it works: Built into select 2nd generation Intel® Core™ processor-based PCs, IPT eliminates the need to memorize a code or attach a security device to your computer. When you access an Intel IPT-integrated web site you will be prompted to “register” your PC at that site.. On subsequent logins, you simply enter your user name and password and behind the scenes the PC generates a unique six digit code which gets validated by the website. Intel IPT’s smart technology makes this process simpler and more secure, changing your code at regular intervals before your account can be hacked. If you’re away from your PC, the web site can also offer an alternative method for authenticating users (such as SMS one-time password codes sent to registered phones or pre-determined knowledge based questions). For the end user, this whole process is very fast, easy and frictionless.

For a demo of the IPT experience, go HERE.

The great news is that OEMs started shipping IPT-enabled consumer desktops and laptops in June, and more than a dozen are now available, offering people and Web sites an integrated way of protecting access to online accounts. In addition, more than 1,000 Web sites now support IPT-enabled computers, and Intel is actively working with partners to expand that number.

For more information, please go to www.ipt.intel.com.

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Technology@Intel

I started reading L. Ron Hubbard’s Battlefield Earth. I say “started” because I think at this point I have stopped. I follow Nancy Pearl’s guideline regarding when to stop a book, and this one is going to go into the breakup pile for me. The actual book is pretty terrible but the introduction to the book is a gem of nonfiction storytelling. Hubbard spends quite a bit of time discussing just what science fiction means, what the genre contains, and what science fiction as a genre has done. Hubbard claims that during the Golden Age of science fiction, he, along with other notables writing at the time and working with scientists, conspired to write in such a way that mankind was inspired to go to the moon. Since man did eventually travel to space and the moon, Hubbard implies strongly (he pretty much flat out says) in the introduction that it is because of science fiction that man can dream such things and then succeed in doing them. Whether his conclusions are correct and credit for space exploration does lie at the feet of science fiction writers is not as important as Hubbard’s belief that science fiction is ultimately about people and the dreams it inspires in them.

The same day I read Hubbard’s introduction, I was listening to Slice of SciFi, an excellent podcast of all things geek. In the news segment, they mentioned a group working to create a real life medical tricorder. A medical tricorder, for those readers who are not complete geeks, is a handheld device from Star Trek that scans the body and diagnoses illnesses. The X-Prize Foundation is hoping to launch a competition for a medical tricorder next year. Science fiction does fuel our dreams, especially when backed by a million dollar prize.

As librarians, we know is that books and access to information can be fuel for people’s dreams: dreams of different places, different lives, and different possibilities. Science fiction, specifically, can inspire us to dream technology beyond what we thought possible and cause us to ask, “What if?” We know information is power, and most educators know this to be true as well. We spend our entire careers working so a kid can come through our doors, learn something new, and be the next generation’s Steve Squyres.

There is also no doubt that technology rules our lives. Everything we own, even our refrigerators, can access the cloud. There are classes and seminars on keeping up, learning new tech, and unplugging for our sanity.

Technology’s priority in our lives is increasing, but sometimes it seems that the importance of the book is decreasing. Perhaps it is only the format that is losing favor, because information seems to be just as important as it ever was, maybe more so since we seem to demand to have it all the time, everywhere.

The real question, the question we librarians have been asking, is: Where does that leave us? Do we redefine what we do (hint: it’s not books) and still stay true to who we are–providers of equal access to information? What I know is that there is no doubt that technology, which has answered so many other questions, will answer this one as well.

Perhaps we should all reread our favorite SciFi novels for clues as to where we could go in the future. A good book reread is never without merit.