by Michelle Lentz
A friend of mine is a librarian. Still, when you think of the word librarian, you think of Marian the Librarian from the Music Man, or another mild-mannered bookworm. But times have changed, and so have the librarians. Libraries have always been a place, for me, of organized information. Well, now there is so much information to organize, constantly changing and aggregating, and so many different ways to access it.
That friend I mentioned, Jason Griffey, is a digitally connected librarian. He’s an early adopter of all sorts of technology, and fully involved in evangelizing that technology to everyone, but especially to libraries. His latest article, called Stranger Than We Know, was published in the LibraryJournal.com’s NetConnect. The article takes on mobile computing, and what it means, and may mean in the future, for libraries.
So how do librarians interact with this level of mobile, always on, information space? The most important thing we can do is to ensure that when the technology matures, we are ready to deliver content to it. Our role as information portals will not decline—it will simply shift focus from books on shelves and computers on desks to on-time mobile delivery of both holdings and services. Reference will be communitywide and no longer limited to either location (reference desk) or to service (IM, email, etc). It will be person to person in real time. Libraries’ role as localized community archives will shift away from protecting physical items and toward being stewards of the digital data tied to those items in the coming information cloud, ensuring that our collections are connected to the services in the online world that provide the most value for our users. Our collections will be more and more digitized and available, with copyright holders allowing localized sharing founded on location-based authentication. If you are X miles away from a given library, you should be able to browse its collections from your mobile, potentially checking out a piece of information that the library has in its archives and holding onto it, moving on to another localized collection as you walk around a city.
Do you still go to your library? (Have you forgotten about it?) I use the Cincinnati library for their free wireless, a place to work that’s outside of my home, and I do a lot of research there for wine and food articles I write. I love the library. I can access their catalog from my phone or my home computer, which is also helpful. (I still look nostalgically at the old card catalog though.)
How much do you use your library? What changes have you noticed in the last few years? Are your children learning about a completely different type of library than the one you used growing up? Let me know in the comments.
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Contact Michelle with your news, apps, and events via email, Twitter, Pownce, or FriendFeed. Visit Michelle at Wine-Girl.net and Write Technology. You can also catch Michelle presenting on Twitter at the upcoming DevLearn ’08 in San Jose.