Thank you for contributing to the ATG Trendspotting 2018 Trend Storm! This brainstorming phase of the ATG Trendspotting Initiative is set up to identify social, policy, economic, technology, and educational trends and forecasting the impacts of these trends on scholarly communication, publishing, and academic libraries.

You may fill out this form as many times as you would like but we would ask that you only submit one trend per form.

Also, please consider nominating yourself to participate in the Trend Lab meeting at the Charleston Conference on November 5, 3:00-5:00 pm by indicating your interest on this form. We will be looking to balance participation across all stakeholder groups (e.g., librarians, publishers, technology platforms, etc.) and will contact invitees in mid-August. 

A trend is a tendency or direction of change over time. A trend can be increasing or a decreasing; it can be strong or weak; it can be accerlating or slowing. 

“Trends are those change factors that arise from broadly generalizable change and innovation. They are experienced by everyone and often in more or less the same contexts insofar as they create broad parameters for shifts in attitudes, policies and business focus over periods of several years that usually have global reach. What is interesting about trends is that normally most players, organizations or even nations cannot do much to change them – they are larger than the power of individual organizations and often nation states as well.” (Saritas & Smith, 2011, p. 294, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2010.11.007)