Week Six : Thing 15

Learning 2.0 and the Future of Libraries.
To everything there is a season. There is nothing new under the sun. To thine own self be true.
My first "job" working in a library was in elementary school. The librarian would let me behind the desk and stamp my classmates' books with due dates. Pretty darn low tech. No bells and whistles, just you and the books and the worlds contained within. That was the truth of that library in that time. It was about reading, information. It was about opening and expanding the mind beyond everyday existence in order to grow a person, to invest in their, and thereby, the world's future. Scroll forward to undergraduate school where I worked in the Music Library. This was a place of exploration. Once again a place to expand oneself but it was also a place of "social networking", a place to meet friends, to talk, to share, and to drive the librarian crazy. (That woman deserves sainthood for so good-naturedly putting up with our crazy antics). Moving on, I worked in the cataloging department in the medical/health sciences library in a univesity setting. Technology was just making it's way into libraries. We were using OCLC and those big bulky terminals. The emphasis on this library was providing needed information pure and simple. Access and speed of retrieval were the driving factors. Same for the serials department I worked in at another University. More technology was available for serials management. In both University situations the transition from print to digital was not easy, not because we objected to it but because the technology was not improving access or increasing speed. Print was faster and more accurate. The technology had not developed sufficiently to be an improvement over the paper systems. Moving forward to working in law libraries. In this environment I was on the cutting edge. I saw the need for information at the speed of sound was a constant for attorneys. Technology could do this I felt but the attorneys were not sold on it. When I implemented the first access to the Internet in the entire law firm in my library I was told by the managing partner that I "shouldn't be anticipating the needs of the attorneys" that they "would just let me know when they needed something". Through training, one-on-one's with the attorneys, publishing an in-house newsletter, and proving to them that this was the way government agencies and courts were going, I finally turned them around until they were clamoring for everyone to have access. Years have passed with my seeing technology more and more important in libraries. I see decisions made for the sake of technology rather than to expand on the essence of the library. Perhaps each library and each librarian needs to ask themselves these questions when faced with making a decision about technology, or where they should spend their moneis, or how they should build and design their buildings; what is our truth, are we supporting that truth, and are we "marketing" our truth? What drives our decisions; zeitgeist, the need to justify our existence, or our truth.