·         Digital Literacy

·         Federated Index

Digital literacy is according to Wikipedia “the ability to locate, organize, understand, evaluate, and create information using digital technology”. Libraries have for a long time trained and supported their communities with these skills but having “Digital Literacy” on the same importance level as “Literacy” it will surely for the libraries mean changes in strategies, policies and the overall efforts. It will start an explosion of planned and structured activities when the goals are formulated in ways of having the whole community being able to locate, organize, understand, evaluate, and create information using digital technology.

That is somewhat undermining the other trend “Federated Index”. A novelty last year, a trend this year. A Federated Index, in opposite to “federated search”, collects all possible metadata beforehand and indexes it for the one point of search purpose. Ebsco Discovery, Summons and Primo Central are examples of this. Axiell Arena has the possibility to do the same. A “One stop shop” federated index is of course an attractive model. “Giving up” your local data to central indexing machines (WorldCat is another example) you lose possibilities. Possibilities to explore, interact, enrich, collaborate, mash up, “serendip” with your data. That is if you fully give it up. Go for the option of the smartness of the one stop shop federated index. You use it when know exactly what you want and that media it is not available to you physically/electronically from your own library. When keeping the power of your data locally you can use it with your preferred tools to electronically build your site where your community enjoys a rich end user experience combined with the full opportunity for you and the community to exploit the digital literacy path together.