BIALL Seminar: James Mullan on Emerging Technologies

There was plenty of food for thought at James Mullan’s presentation on Emerging Technologies last night, hosted by BIALL at Finers Stephens Innocent in Great Portland Street.  James focussed on three areas: applications, technologies and future trends.

The main topic under applications was the emergence of Google+ onto the social media marketplace. While a show of hands round the room showed that only a few people have tested the waters here so far, the message was that this application should not be ignored by anyone interested in social media.  The most innovative features are its ‘hangouts’ and ‘circles’, new methods of online friend management.

However you may already have seen Google’s own internal voices of dissent leaked to Silicon Filter last week, under the  heading "Our complete failure to understand platforms" . One to watch, nonetheless. And should anyone else out there still need convincing of the commercial power of social media, here are some great facts and figures that James pulled out to introduce the evening, courtesy of Eric Qualman's Social Media Revolution video. 

James went on to talk briefly about Cloud Computing, and the growing benefits of software and infrastructure as a service. He very rightly pointed out that information professionals have been in the forefront of using remotely sourced solutions for many years.  However as many of these technologies are now being marketed directly to fee-earners, information workers in the legal sector may need to fight to ensure that service provision is clearly coordinated, and in the short-term the opportunities for service development may be dictated by internal policies of individual firms.  

The second area where law librarians will need to assert themselves is in the development of mobile technologies. At present, the most significant developments are stateside e.g. Fastcase, and subscription applications released by LexisNexis and Westlaw.  Mobile intranets are another growth area, exemplars being UKParliament, and developments in the Higher Education sector, for instance at the Queensland University of Technology.  The questions to consider here are not simply how best to push maximum content to the new environment, but what are the customer imperatives for mobile content, and what will specifically add value to existing services? 

Taking this further, an additional significant question is what will the role of e-books be and how can they be integrated into existing law library & information services.  Again this is a question that has been and is already being actively investigated in the local authority and academic environments.

For another perspective on all of the above, Tom Boone’s article in Information Outlook from February of this year is worth revisiting: “Library Mobile Applications: What Counts as Success?”  

Finally James quickly surveyed some future trends, namely the implications of crowdsourcing, customisation and personalisation, and generally the challenges posed by the emergence of Web 3.0 – the semantic web.  As an occasional Luddite who can be driven to irrational rage by the vagaries of predictive text and Google Instant, these are developments that make me peer over my lunettes in consternation. 

For more on current trends, check out Mary Meeker's recent presentation at this week's Web 2.0 summit via the Business Insider.

Thanks again to James and to BIALL for an enjoyable and informative evening.

- Donald.

Comments

[James Mullan]

Donald - many thanks for so eloquently summarising my talk. I felt it was well received, although it's hard to predict what technologies are going to be the killers one next week let alone next year. I hope I gave those present food for thought and it will certainly be interesting to see whether we can catch up with our colleagues in the academic sector.