Libraries as Organizations

Technology and reference are intertwining strands of public service. The task of keeping up with Librarians (and their jobs) is getting techier. As our systems get more sophisticated and our desire to overhaul and remake those systems gets more intense, libraries need librarians who are tech savvy and back office staff who are pure tech. It's not uncommon to hear librarians declare that "Technology is Reference", but is that a one-way street? There's no doubt that reference librarians need a strong technology skill set, but do our techies need to have public service experience or skills? Read More »

Every now and then, usually when I have a moment by myself, I think about the state of librarianship.  I ponder the opportunities, the problems, and the progress.  Generally, these periodic, informal "state of librarianship" addresses to myself are optimistic. 

Over the past couple of decades, rather than concentrate on outright threats to librarianship, I have tended to focus on things that are holding librarianship back, or retarding its growth and development.  Questions of momentum, acceleration, and deceleration are much more mundanely interesting than questions about the life and death of a profession.  Although Google is doing some interesting and large-scale things to make information findable and usable, and thus seems like it poses something of a threat to librarians, we really cannot do much about what Google does or plans to do.

By concentrating on the retarding factors, perhaps we can identify tangible problems that we can work to solve.
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As I reflected on my 2008 Information Commons field trips, I realized how important these spaces are to information literacy, to the relevance of the library and to the mission of the institution itself.

In "The Comedy of the Commons," Dr. Carol M. Rose describes the commons as a place where each person adds more value. In our LIS701 course here at Dominican, we use Rose to illustrate the potential and usefullness of common spaces in relation to different types of libraries and what they might mean to their users. According to Rose,  "The more who join and use the commons, the greater the enjoyment of each participant."

This was entirely evident in the series of field trips I made this year to visit library spaces that had integrated the idea of the commons. Read More »

This morning, while Max my dog and I were out for an early morning stroll, a truly cockamamie idea dawned on me.

It began as I was contemplating the recent feeding frenzy involving bloggers, reporters, and columnists over the commercial release of the Kindle ebook reader from Amazon.  A quick search in Technorati for the keywords "Amazon Kindle" pulled back over 3700 posts.  It's amazing that thousands of bloggers have commented on this device.    Read More »