I’m adding this article by Stephen Abram to my LIS701 syllabus. http://www.infotoday.com/searcher/sep08/Abram.shtml Abram offers various scenarios for the future of reference services, including this one: Status Quo: A Recipe for Fossilization This is the disaster scenario — at least for our profession. Suppose we don’t evolve fast enough. Most of us know the story of the frog in the boiling water. Will we be blind to the overall changes and allow ad-driven search results to dominate the important question space? Worse still, will we fall into the trap of demanding a Google-like experience? Will there be no event, no transformational experience that […]
Monthly Archives: January 2009
44 posts
I get very excited at the power and promise of what we’re doing: innovative services, new buildings, the harnessing of new technologies to extend our services in surprising ways, and much, much more. With that in mind, I offer a few simple hopes for this shiny new year. Many libraries are doing these things already while others are testing the waters. Wherever your institution is going, these are things I hope for: I hope that we tell our story well. I hope that we guide our users into the digital landscape. I hope that we make good decisions. I hope that […]
final things, originally uploaded by circulating. Congrats to Iris Shreve Garrott who is retiring from McCracken PL! I’m swiping some text from her blog bio page: As the family matriarch and company employee with the most longevity it is my responsibility to show everyone else how important it is to be play and be happy as they work on the web. Oh… and I am happy 100% of the time now… for really. for more career bio, here is a press release from April 27, 2006… Although plenty of people work extremely hard for youth in the Paducah community, few ever […]
By Michael Casey & Michael Stephens You make every effort to create a transparent library. You listen to your staff and customers and give them all possible means to talk to you-email, blogs, paper comment cards, telephone numbers, instant messaging, etc. You try to listen in via Twitter and Yelp. You hold community nights for customers to talk to you and go out to where they are and try to hold conversations where it is most convenient for them. From all of this, you try to steer your library on the right course, paying heed to and responding to input. […]