Jenny Levine on Dead Technologies

One of the highlighhts of this Conference was seeing Jenny Levine at the Wednesday night Dead and Emerging Technologies session. She made some great points. This stuff is spot on. She gratefully shared her notes with me, so here’s a bit that really hit home for me: (Jenny’s words are in bold!)

THINGS THAT SCARE ME

– Library web sites with email reference forms that say ?We will respond to your email within 48 hours? Uh Oh – SJCPL is guilty!

– Libraries that don?t provide wireless access for patrons, librarians that don?t understand why they will need to OH YES!!!

– Librarians who think patrons won?t bring their own mobile devices into the library and expect to use them there (laptops, PDAs, cell phones, smartphones, Tablet PCs, MP3 players, etc.)

– Librarians who sit behind a desk waiting for kids to walk into the building and up to the reference desk to ask them a question Case in point: Aaron the roving untethered librarian who was sitting next to me during this session!

DEAD TECHNOLOGY: any electronic device you can hold in your hand that does not have wireless capabilities