Just in time for the holidays, the folks at ReadWriteWeb.com have published their techy predictions for 2010!  It truly is the most wonderful time of the year – for tech geeks like me, anyway.   Some of the predictions are, well, predictable (Facebook will continue to grow – and continue to have privacy problems, the iPhone will rule) but some are a little more interesting (Google’s Android phones will make major inroads because the iPhone App Store sucks, more people will be making e-commerce transactions with mobile devices, “netbooks” lose ground, and in between devices – not quite as tiny as a netbook, but much more streamlined than a notebook – take off).

It’s an interesting read for anyone interested in technology, but the implications for libraries is pretty clear: our patrons are rapidly moving toward an increasingly mobile experience and and they will continue to congregate in online spaces that offer social functionality.

Has your library taken any steps to be a participant in your community’s mobile computing world? Have you engaged your patrons in existing social spaces online, or added social functionality to your own web spaces?  Let us know in the comments!

(and PS – if you are interested in techy stuff, and don’t subscribe to or regularly read ReadWriteWeb, you should!!)

I’ve recently been working on a project for the State library in Nevada to evaluate their statewide resource sharing activities. Since my job keeps resource sharing on my mind all the time, I jumped right into to the work.  I stumbled a bit though, when the project manager asked me to clarify my definition for resource sharing. Alas, I quickly learned the importance of making sure we were all talking about the same thing.

Resource sharing is one of those terms that gets tossed about and has different nuances depending on the situation. Folks at a state library agency will include many activities in resource sharing that their colleagues in a public or academic library may not.

Here’s a bit of what I drafted for the Advisory committee that I’m working with in Nevada. How do you define resource sharing in your work?

Definitions of the term “resource sharing” are not as consistent as terms such as “interlibrary loan,” which is a well-defined service provided to patrons and to other libraries. “Resource sharing,” however, represents a broader scope of services than interlibrary loan. It is often defined in terms of a set of activities. For example, resource sharing at National Library of Australia “maintains and develops national union catalogues and library directory services; provides access services such as Libraries Australia Search, PictureAustralia, MusicAustralia and federated search initiatives; operates bibliographic and interlibrary loan utility services; develops new resource discovery services such as People Australia; and develops appropriate business partnerships” (http://www.nla.gov.au/initiatives/sharing.html). Alternately, resource sharing is described in broad strokes such as “a concept which has developed to include many cooperative activities between libraries and other stakeholders.” (Library and Archives Canada http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/8/3/r3-648-e.html). Shirley Baker in her introduction to The Future of Resource Sharing defines the term as “means both cooperative collection development . . . and interlibrary loan, or the movement of materials among libraries or other suppliers in response to users’ needs” (p.1).

In creating the Request for Proposal for this study, the Nevada State Library and Archives defined resource sharing as “a concept which has developed to include many cooperative activities of sharing information and materials among libraries and other stakeholders. Interlibrary loan continues to be the mainstay of resource sharing.” pg. 6

I propose the following definition for the work of this study: “The sharing, transfer or procurement of materials by libraries beyond their current collection as prompted by patron need.” This definition incorporates activity beyond interlibrary loan such as patron placed holds in a consortial catalog or the purchase-on-demand activities that are starting to take place in many ILL departments and might even include collaborative collection development activity.

I just received a message from the RDA-L list that RDA (Resource Description and Access, the next edition of the cataloging rules for the English-speaking world) is now to be published in June 2010. The message was sent by Mary Ghikas, Chair of the Committee of Principals, Alan Danskin, Chair of the Joint Steering Committee for Development of RDA, and Don Chatham, Chair of the Co-publishers.

Hopefully no one was holding his/her breath for the November 2009 release of it? The bright side is, that you now have something to look forward to next summer, and you won’t need to spend the holiday season with RDA.

They also announced that “pricing and purchasing information will be introduced at the time of the ALA Midwinter Meeting, 15-18 January 2010”— perhaps in time to budget for it, if any one will be able to buy staff resources next year.

I’ve not found the announcement elsewhere online yet.