Computers in Libraries, Day 3
I'm writing this post-conference, obviously. The lack of WiFi still amazes me. But on to conference thoughts...
Friday was chock full of sessiony goodness. Too much goodness to possibly cover it all. Lee Rainie (of Pew Internet Project) gave a thought provoking key note on Millennials. I'm never much on generational labels — probably my own Generation X anxieties — but his analysis was excellent and useful. Rainie drew reasonable conclusions about a generation that has grown up connected. Interesting, too, that his conclusions were not the stereotypical short-attention-span conclusions I've heard in the past.
I attended most of the search engine-related talks. Kevin Dames had the most to say in this area. At least, he had something more to say than "here's how libraries can remain relevant in the age of Google." (Yawn!)
Kevin's talk, "Is Google the Next Dialog?", explained Google from a technical perspective (quite accurately, too) and from a social perspective. Kevin's belief is that libraries should leverage the power of Google to free ourselves from the hold of multi-million dollar database vendor contracts, and in return, offer Google the librarian's expertise at categorizing, clustering, and classifying results. Very interesting stuff, though I'm not sure I agree with that last point.
Perhaps in connection with Google Scholar something like that is possible, but I'm not sure the average user wants clustered results, at least in Kevin's use of the term. Social clustering might be interesting, though. I wonder what would happen if a library implemented tagging through it's catalog. Users could mark resources with a term that proves useful to them in addition to the usual LC subject headings. Of course, you would need related social infrastructure in place, too.
This is were libraries should focus in my opinion: less on competing with search engines and more on providing community. This is the whole point of [Web|Library] 2.0. Make the library a commons, both virtually and in the real, and you won't be able to stop users from talking, writing, IMing, and tagging the library.
Posted by deryck on March 27, 2006
