technology and your library

There was some buzz in the library blog space about "why tech".  Why do I need this new tech?  How am I supposed to keep up with all the changes, all the blogging, all the new everything.

My answer is: maybe you don't.  You don't serve technology, tech serves you.

Remember that we are all writing from different perspectives.  CISTI is a C$50 million a year organization, with multi-million revenue (cost-recovery) streams through both docdel and publishing.  We're 30 minutes outside the downtown core and, based on my observations, these days we get almost no foot traffic from researchers.  We also have "embedded" librarians throughout NRC institutes.  Either we provide information to our librarians and researchers remotely, and preferably electronically, or we perhaps cease to exist.

This, as you might imagine, gives us a strong impetus to leverage technology.

Michael Stevens has a great presentation out that he gave at NEASIST: Optimizing Technology in Libraries.  The optimal set of technologies for the types of information you provide to your users is, or should be, unique to your set of requirements and capabilities.

He puts it clearly:

“Technology is a tool…
it is only a tool”
Sandra Nelson
Wired for the Future

I'm planning to talk more soon about, well, technology planning, in the meantime, here are some starting points from recent postings I have noticed:

Catalogablog talks about his vision for his library.
The recent UCISA 2005 conference "21st Century Thinking" presentations are packed with information to delight the technophiles and further enfear the technophobes.
For visual thinkers, Scott Wilson does some beautiful diagrams.  Here's a recent one on his vision of the future Virtual Learning Environment (VLE).
Is folksonomy an annoying buzzword, or does it describe a useful capability?  schwagbag lays it on the line with Ordering Reality Through Classification: Making the Case for Tags and Folksonomies.
LibraryClips talks about quite an elaborate methodology for Categories vs. tags.
Personally I use tags to make it easier for me to locate and group together information in the vast sea of stuff I blog and bookmark.  As an added benefit, it makes it much easier for people to subscribe to or discover just the categories of my information that they are interested in.
'What are books anyway?  Surely... a technological revolution in information dissemination.  Some people weren't so keen on this new technology.  Kind of like that "Internet" I've been hearing so much about (is that thing still around?).  Why is this important?  Read the conclusion of Library Boy's report about the opening of the new  Grande Bibliothèque in Quebec:

"The poor showing [in books borrowed from libraries] is often called a legacy of the ... Church; according to popular lore, when advocates obtained a $150,000 grant from the Andrew Carnegie Foundation for a new Montreal library in the early 1900s, church authorities forced them to refuse it".

Conference blogging is another technology-enabled way to share information.  Carol Cooke provides her thoughts from  Manitoba Libraries Conference 2005 Day 1.
Blogging is great, but what about these darn wiki things?  LibraryClips talks about going from blog to wiki:

Transferring the essential information from a blog or message board and archiving it in a presentable format like a wiki (the information in the wiki can link back to the original blog posts).

I wish I did this, instead I keep all the information I like in a social bookmark manager like Furl. This is good to store and share information, but it lacks the clarity in presentation of a wiki or a simple web-page. The natural third step is place items of great importance or use in a wiki format or your own webpage.

This is simple but great insight, a company may be working on a particular project; gathering all relevant information for this project from the blogs of the company and archive them in a wiki, listing them in one list/s you can scroll down.
It’s not neccessarily long term, the wiki may be just set up to serve the purpose of a project, once finished the wiki is there for retrospective purposes.

So there you have it, a ton of technology being pondered, just in a few days' worth of blog postings.  Here's the key: pick what's useful for you.