Thursday, October 11, 2007

In-Service: Technologies and Trends

Wow! There was lots of energy and excitement at our annual staff in-service training day. It started off with a burst of enthusiasm when Mike Eisenberg, University of Washington, delivered his opening keynote presentation: "What's out there and what it might mean in terms of strengths, weaknesses, oportunities and threats to, for, and by libraries." As an illustration of how much things have changed in just a few years, he showed this YouTube video.

Additional speakers included Stacey Aldrich, Deputy State Librarian, Alma Ortega from UC San Diego, Pat Wagner from Pattern Research, Cheryl Gould from InfoPeople, Walter Minkel from New York Public Library, Sandra Ley from Arizona State University, Lucille Boone and Sandra Stewart from San Jose Public Library, and Sacramento Public staff.

Collectively, they spoke of how social networking services like MySpace, Facebook, Del.icio.us, Second Life, Flickr, blogging sites like Blogger, and the availability of new tools and gadgets are changing the way people expect to find information, and should be changing the way libraries deliver it, in order to remain in the game.

Look for good stuff from your library soon!

3 comments:

Pat in Profile said...

I'm currently an MLIS student at San Jose State who's taking classes online to get my degree while working here in Sacramento. It was really interesting to see that the things we're talking about in classes are also being discussed by my public library. I can't wait to see the changes!

Pat

annot8 said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
annot8 said...

Hi Patois,
Thanks for the comment! Changes happen one small step at a time... but they are happening. Watch for a future post about our branches' MySpaces.