Blog – Book – Blog
January 5th, 2006 by Christopher HarrisMichael Stephens of Tame the Web provided a link to MaisonBisson’s reprint of a friend’s newspaper article about Library 2.0 (L2) from a patron’s perspective. Michael, focuses on the academic connections in the article, but I was more drawn to the author’s view of the upcoming academic customers – our current high school students. Joe Monninger, described as “a library’s favorite patron” is talking about the quibbling in academia over the definitions of “book” and “publish” as related to things like LuLu.com and blogging. Then he backs up a bit and looks at more reasons why I keep suggesting that we need to move beyond “book.”
Younger people, naturally, find all of this equivocating silly. They know where they are going to look for information, and it sure as heck isn’t the library — at least not the library as it currently exists. In a healthy way, perhaps, they don’t make distinctions about information. They use it, then move on. Sometimes that gets them into trouble when they are not discerning enough about the internet source of information, but that’s a relatively small price to pay for the rapidity and ease of availability. Ask a teenager what’s playing at the movies, and she or he will go to the net to find out, not the local paper or phone book. Ask him or her to write something about Hamlet, and they are going to Google Hamlet and get back to you. The quaint trip to the library in the roadster with Betty Sue — and a malt afterward — is doubtless a thing of the long past. (Joe Monninger via MaisonBisson)
Wow. What a great description of a radical perceptual shift that librarians need to think more about. As Joe goes on to explain, this isn’t doom and gloom for libraries, but it is very different. I would also note, in connection to my recent post about my experiences with the Rural Digital Divide, that Joe’s view of the library of now involves quite a bit of connectivity. As he sees it: “the typical homeowner with internet access can have all of Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Dickens, Austen, and on and on and on from the comfort of their computer screen” (Joe Monninger via MaisonBisson).
If, I would add… they have access, and they are infomancers that know how to use the power to which they are connected.
January 7th, 2006 at 3:19 am
[...] Casey Bisson at Maison Bisson, Michael Stephens at Tame the Web, and Christopher Harris at Infomancy got me thinking about our clients. I’m pretty recently out of college, and there is a vas [...]