Trends

The Center for the Future of Libraries works to identify trends relevant to libraries and librarianship. This collection is available to help libraries and librarians understand how trends are developing and why they matter. Each trend is updated as new reports and articles are made available. New trends will be added as they are developed.

Trends will be organized into seven categories: Society, Technology, Education, the Environment, Politics (and Government), Economics, and Demographics (STEEPED). We have shared more information about the organization and classification of trends below.

Organization and Classification of Trends

Many futurists and trend scanners encourage the organizing or classifying of trends to help improve our understanding of trends, piece them together, and to ensure a broad view of the trends shaping our world. The DEGEST method of classification (Demography, Economy, Government, Environment, Society, and Technology) is among the most popular. For our purposes, we have expanded the classification to include Education as its own category and have re-labeled to form the acronym STEEPED: Society [red], Technology [light blue], Education [dark blue], the Environment [green], Politics & Government [orange], Economics [purple], and Demographics [yellow]. Each trend icon is color-coded to a category per the key below: