The ACRL Media Discussion Group that took place on January 25th was quite a success. We had 30 attendees nestled in a room for 25 (even though we asked for a room for 40). Our presenters, Rachel Gordon, representing Re:frame, and Tracy Montri of the Toledo-Lucas County Public Library did an excellent job of getting the discussion going. Rachel’s talk and Tracy’s presentation are available at the ACRL Media Discussion Group wiki. Mine is available there as well, but I will also include it here.
My interest has been kind of peaked on this topic. There have been numerous articles published lately that DVD sales are down and although Blu-ray is doing okay, sales haven’t been great. I’ve also noticed that there’s also a lot more people turning to products like Popcorn Hour (http://www.popcornhour.com/onlinestore/) and media tanks like the Western Digital offering (http://www.westerndigital.com/en/products/products.asp?DriveID=572) and NAS servers to store media and use their new HDTV to display stored content in full HD. I think that once hardware developers figure out how to deliver a cheap, network capable storage device with a decent operating interface that supports things like Amazon downloads, HULU, Netflix, etc… DVD sales will drop off the radar like CD sales. Were aren’t quite there yet though. It seems like right now, the only devices capable of handling all this are PC’s. Maybe we will soon see HDTV’s with built in hard drives? I know that some companies are already looking into developing network capable sets and sets with usb ports. It will be interesting to see what the near future holds as far as how librarians deliver the digital content of what was previously offered on DVD and how users respond.
Thanks for your comment, Chris. These are indeed strange and heady times in the media library world. Media is coming at us in so many ways, we really need to change our thinking about what “collection development” means. DVDs are slowly dying and there’s no one clear thing that’s going to replace them.