Opening General Session
FLA started off this morning with the Opening General Session which included:
- Faye Roberts presenting a proclamation from Governor Charlie Crist for April to be "Library Appreciation Month"
- Kaye Byrnes telling the Story Stone
- An introduction to the newest FLA elected officials- Mercedes Clements (VP/President Elect), Barbara Stites, Tom Sloan and Tamaro Taylor
The keynote speaker was Stephen Abram, who is the Vice President for Innovation at SirsiDynix. His presentation was "A Tech Forecast: Library 2.0 in the Real World." He talked about the newest 2.0 technologies and how they can work in libraries...and how they should and will be soon, but his focus was on how libraries need to change! We are facing massive, exponential change with technology and the millennials.
Technology issues:
- Ebooks. Google will have 250 million titles digitized in five years. How will we compete?
- Web browsers are continually shrinking and will be the size of a credit card. Will we be ready to work in this space?
- Fully integrating IM into our services. One college demonstrated a 30% increase in pass rate among athletes using this service.
- The US is now 98% broadband compatible - meaning more and more of our users will be accessing us via high speed Internet
- Millennials- on average have 30 points higher IQ than Baby Boomers, format agnostic, eyes move differently than boomers, find-oriented not search-oriented. Are we ready for them?
- Are we ready for tagging in our OPAC and creating RSS Feeds to be oriented into community web sites (i.e. garden book/topical feed on the Garden Clubs pages).
- DVDs will be obsolete in 5 years, are we preparing for the next format- streaming and downloadable. Denver PL has streaming videos in catalog
- How will we deal with the Amazon model vs. our privacy concerns for our users. We can not create the personalized service without collecting information
- Are we using social networking to our advantage? Facebook, MySpace, Ning, Bebo and other new sites. Kids are creating sustainable social networks that will last for life through these sites- are we part of this network?
Stephen was full of colorful but on target analogies. Here are two....
- How are we marketing/positioning ourselves? A builder tells you about the house of your dreams he is going to build - not about which saw he is going to use, libraries are doing the opposite - we tell users about the tools not the outcome (we have these databases, and resources not - you'll get better grades for using us).
- Everywhere, including libraries, you see automated toilets- why? People don't remember to flush...yet librarians want to teach everyone complicated Boolean searching. Lesson: we need our interfaces to work with our users.
Stephen Abram kicked off FLA on the right note- challenging our complacency and creating the desire to learn and create libraries for the future.
4 comments:
Thank you for the conference notes. Those of us who could not attend because we are in the library today serving our patrons appreciate the information!
Diana, I appreciate your overview since I was unable to attend the conference. Sharing is what blogging and librarianship is all about and we don't even need to attach a version number to it! ;)
Thank you!
Thanks for the posting. Sorry, to me it sounds like the same old thing. Libraries have to change, the keynote speaker said so, blah blah blah. What else is new??
And...obviously blogs are not that necesary in life or there would be hundreds of postings at the FLA blog by now.
Yes, blogs are by no means "necessary in life", but they are tools, albeit simple ones, that can help people to communicate ideas and share experiences. Honestly, I can't think of one blog that has hundreds of postings within a few days. And if one does exist, even if the postings were constructive and well written, I don't think I could stay focused long enough to read one that large -- especially with so many other "voices" available.
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