Infodoodads gives me HOPE! I read this message today and went to check out the new blog - it looks great and I plan to keep my eye on it (or, I should say, I have added it to my bloglines)! It also gives me hope - read on....

Greetings,

Several librarians (Margaret Mellinger, Hannah Rempel, Kate Gronemyer, and
Jane Nichols), one librarian to-be (Michael Baird) and myself have been
maintaining a blog dedicated to reviewing information tools on the Net. A
little shameless self-promotion never hurts, and I wanted to spread the
word. :)

We hope our website is useful for librarians and other information-lovers.
Please check it out at http://infodoodads.com/

Have a great day!
Laurie
.......................................................
Laurie M. Bridges Business & Economics Librarian Oregon State
University

What's especially nice about this to me is that I have recently been thinking about and talking to some people about just what it is that the current crop of library students are learning.

I graduated from library school in 2003 and it's been awhile (especially when you think of how quickly things change and advance in technology and the world) since I've been in school! I think about how we are all working hard to "catch-up" and help others "catch-up" to all the new technologies and ideas about customer service and so on... if we are currently producing new librarians who will find themselves in this same position then we are fighting a losing battle!

One might think that the "new" librarians are "young" librarians and would automatically be "hip" to the new social technologies, i.e. facebook, instant messaging, flickr, etc., but this is not necessarily true, and it is also not necessarily true that any/all "young people" know about this stuff and/or understand or believe in it in relation to the library world.

Case in point: I mentioned this to my library garden pals and one replied with anecdotal evidence that I was afraid of:

I did a talk for (a class) as recently as October 2006. By show of hands,
maybe 2 out of 30 in the class had any idea what RSS is, or read any
library blogs.

I found this upsetting . . . (because) RSS IS
an information literacy technology. Perhaps it is THE single best
technology for allowing us to manage the flow, display, sharing, and consumption
of information. As promoters of information literacy, librarians should be
ALL OVER THIS.

Oh great. What is going on here!? What are the library students being taught about. If we are spending time and effort catching-up current librarians, I think this will have to include some of the library professors as well. Apparently.

However, this blog is a ray of hope to me since there is a student on there and he obviously knows about these things and is blogging about them with some colleagues. I guess you could say that he perhaps knew/knows about those things already and didn't learn them in library school.

You also might say that maybe the students USE RSS and don't know it - like many "lay" people do - If you ask a bunch of people if they use RSS they say no - but if you ask them do you use My Yahoo! and they say yes, then they are using RSS and they just don't know it.

Of course the second point about reading library blogs there is just no excuse about!

So check out this blog to help yourself "keep up" and let's think about doing something NOW about the next generation of librarians being "created" so we won't be fighting against a growing tide of people who just "don't get it."

Note: I just found out that Leslie Burger, current ALA president (and Director of the Princeton Public Library, NJ) is interested in this and is working (I think) on a way to look into this and address it. Yay! :-)

Also: If you want to look at a great and simple way of learning about RSS, check this out.

Labels: amy kearns, blogs, librarians, students, technology

  ¶ posted by Amy J. Kearns, MLIS @ 11:20 AM