Week 6 Thing #15

Of all the posts on Web 2.0, "Away from the Icebergs" most closely reflected my own views and philosophy of what libraries need to do to be relevant in the future.

In his very perceptive article Rick Anderson writes:

We need to focus our efforts not on teaching research skills but on eliminating the barriers that exist between patrons and the information they need, so they can spend as little time as possible wrestling with lousy search interfaces and as much time as possible actually reading and learning.

While I don't think we need to abandon the teaching of research skills altogether, I do think that it's important for us to work at eliminating the barriers to locating the information by creating intuitive user interfaces that use natural language instead of "librarian-ese." As Anderson says, it's hard to reach every patron personally, and many of our students and their parents are using our resources at home where there isn't a friendly librarian on hand to help them know where to look. If we can successfully create these intuitive online library environments, our lessons can focus less on location of information and more on the critical thinking skills of using information.

Lastly, Anderson urges librarians to "acknowledge and adapt to radical, fundamental change" that we are seeing in our society today. Earlier this month the National School Board Association released a study about teenagers and their online behaviors. One finding was that

students report that they are spending almost as much time using social networking services and Web sites as they spend watching television. Among teens who use social networking sites, that amounts to about 9 hours a week online, compared to 10 hours a week watching television.

If we don't adapt and change the ways that we relate to these young people, we become irrelevant to their world and left in the dust. The opportunity to be an integral part of our students' online lives is there - are we willing to take it?