Fancy psuedo-high tech name for old concept. New technology. Love it, hate it, face it new stuff isn't going away so you may as well embrace it......or don't. The car is still here, the telly is still here and so the computer is here to stay until we can plug in directly to our brains and control everything with our thoughts. Maybe not in our lifetimes (certainly not mine, being a cat) but our children or grandchildren. Although we are still waiting for that hovercar. I am not in favor of technology just for the sake of it. I am not going to use technology I don't need. My mom wouldn't have made a myspace for her branch had it not been for the simple reality that she could not update a page on the SAPL site. That is the real beauty of technology, you need a Web site to advertise something and voila! you can have one today. AND you can update it every hour if you wish with a few clicks. Mom can remember when people paid hundreds of dollars for Web site development and now it's free to anyone who can borrow a computer.
Here's one problem I see. Online is great for some things, but not everyone is online. Even my friend who works at MICROSOFT doesn't have a home computer! So as far as the library is concerned, I think we need a good Web presence, but we need to balance that with other forms of advertising to reach our audience. We also need to watch that we don't alienate anyone with our site by making everything too cool for older computers to deal with.
The library should embrace change and technology, but look at what kinds will really enhance our services like computers to download media onto ipods, mp3 and other media players in-house. Computer classes to teach patrons how to use our Web services like Ebsco etc. Even mini-classes on how to use our catalog to find items seems very useful to me. You'd need a real live person for these classes in case of questions but you could also do videos online to walk patrons through the catalog.
I do love technology and all the fun things it can do, but I also love technology for all the useful things it can do.
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1 comment:
That's incredibly smart and well-spoken. Especially for a cat.
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