Five-Year Information Format Trends Report

In 2003, OCLC released its "Five-Year Information Format Trends Report." Recently, it released an update to the report. The four main areas studied in the original report were:

• Popular Materials
• Scholarly Materials
• Digitization Projects
• Web Resources

The 2004 report takes about the content explosion that is occurring with the new communication technologies and the need for people to be connected all the time. The report also updates the areas of popular and scholarly materials.

One of the most interesting sections of the report is a section on new vocabulary such as:

• Blogosphere
• Blogroll
• Dayparting
• Digital Swarming
• Fleshmet
• Moblogs

(I'll have to try to use fleshmet in a sentence soon!)

By the way, the three top trends noted in 2003 for digitization were:

• commercial digitization expanding
• national digitization growing
• state and local projects increasing