No-brainers

• A few formerly-gung-ho MOOC-creating universities will quietly fold their tents. The hype is dying, the experiments expensive, the results so far lackluster. It is time; the present situation rather resembles the apogee of overseas campuses of US universities, which was followed by a sudden rash of withdrawals. (N.b. this does not mark the end of online education; the Loon expects that to do just fine.)
• ISPs will lose their net-neutrality court fight in the US. For once, they do not have a crushing monetary advantage; moreover, their arguments appear to be of the approximate quality of the Authors Guild’s in the Google/Hathi lawsuits, and that is not a compliment.
• More encryption on the internet. Lots more. Despite the problems with sunsetting SHA1, the Loon expects a more-encrypted internet in 2016 as Let’s Encrypt flourishes mightily.
• More campus shootings and shooting scares. The Loon would be lying if she said she hadn’t worked out as best she can what her response to such a crisis would need to be… or if she were to say she is not afraid.
• More Big Deals bite the dust publicly. The “publicly” is the mildly novel part. Losing Big Deals is merely business as usual.

Perhapses

• A library will be caught in a serious patron-data leak. This one returns from 2015’s list. It is probably inevitable, but the timing cannot be predicted exactly (at least not by the Loon).
• A major MOOC platform will fold or be bought out by (or forcibly merged with) another. This follows from MOOC coattaillers letting go. 2016 may be too early, however.
• ALA’s Committee on Accreditation will make at least one negative-status decision. The perennial.
• One accredited school will voluntarily cede accreditation. This is a long shot, and the Loon has absolutely zero indication that any currently-accredited school is even considering it… but in all honesty, at some point librarians insisting that they must be the center of any LIS-education enterprise will be acknowledged by more than just Berkeley to be more trouble than it’s worth. (Librarians: as your fellow, the Loon asks you kindly to cut that irritating whinging out.)
• A newly metrics-driven university will embroil itself in a highly embarrassing, highly public fight with one or more faculty, in which the university will unequivocally be in the wrong. Metrics are being thrown about with such astonishing fatuousness at present that this seems inevitable; again, the timing is uncertain.

The Loon has enough long-term predictions on the hob that she sees no compelling reason to add more.

Who knows? Not this Loon

• OSTP Memo implementation. At first, this is highly likely to be an utter guano-show overall (for no fault of research-data librarians, let it be said). Whether agencies will stay the course despite the rain of guano the Loon cannot say, nor can she predict what in the world the CHORUS masterminds will pull to produce as chintzy and useless a fake commons as possible.
• Linked data in libraries. MARC is ridiculously tenacious.
• Government-mandated encryption backdoors. The Loon would of course prefer common sense to rule the day, but…

May next year be better than this.

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