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College Librarians Urged To Play Video Games
An anonymous reader writes "At meeting of college librarians, experts tell them they need to start thinking the way video game producers think and provide library services that will make sense to those who play computer games. 'In an era when most students would have to go to a museum to see an old-fashioned card catalog, there's no doubt that libraries have embraced technology. But speakers said that there was a larger split between students -- who are "digital natives," in one popular way of classifying people based on their experience with technology -- and librarians, who are more likely to be "digital immigrants." They may have learned the language, but it's a second language.'"
100 - Uncommon Loot
200 - Rare Loot
300 - Epic Loot
400 - Instances
500 - World Zones
600 - Creatures of Azeroth
700 - Biographies of Alliance and Horde Leaders
800 - History of Azeroth
900 - Addictions
I have never had a problem with the Dewey Decimal system. Could it be that most digital natives are of a younger generation who feel the world should be handed to them and they also feel they have no need to learn anything except that which is of interest to them forcing the rest of the world to conform to their lack of motivation?
And that is different from anyone else
Haven't us guys ALWAYS been accused of skipping the instructions? Be it stereo or bicycle or whatever.
Apparently everything old is now new.
I am afraid that there isn't much that can be done to make library's functional to today's youth. Making some sort of GUI to make finding books easier won't help. Most of the time (as far as I have seen) the kids just give a note to the librarian at the counter and the book magically appears on the counter a few minutes later. Most people are not getting their own books anymore and therefore don't need anything to look up their locations.
I don't want my library to be digitalized for the masses! I like to go to the library as a place to go find real books. Yeah, doing research in a library is totally different from doing it online. Isn't that the point? And you definitely don't need to do lots of reading about how to use a library. You want to get information on a subject, you ask a librarian where you can find information about it, they tell you, you go there and you read the books. It's that simple.
And what was with that religion analogy? Someone seems a little biased, on multiple levels.
The biggest obstacles in the way of librarians teaching students are the librarians who don't want to teach, and the students who don't want to learn.
So where is the companion article titled:
Video game players encouraged to learn to use libraries
?
This is just depressing. More dumbing down.
We should never read before we play, Gee said.OK fine, but I never thought of research as play.
Likewise, tools students will use should be designed with this in mind, Gee said, just the way video games are designed. With video games, you can play while you are inept, he said.True, I do this every day. But again, we're not talking about play. It's a little harder (but not impossible) to graduate from college and hold a job while inept. And of course, the best quote from the article:
Lowered consequences of failure is a key value to embrace, he said.Because we don't want failure to hold anybody back, teach people to learn from their mistakes, or encourage them to work harder.
What about the elderly or other computer illiterates who also will need to use the system? They need to balance the needs of both groups - and not replace the standard catalog search with a FPS because it'll be easier for the youngin's to understand.
When the power goes out? Card catalogs.
I come from the generation who can actually do math without
a calculator. We used slide rules and log tables. We could
interpolate.
Todays digital kids would be lost in a society with no gizmo's.
Surely this is not a survival trait.
"Don't you know the Dewey Decimal System?"
sigh. Gotta pull out that UHF DVD and watch it sometime...
I would like to point out that most college libraries don't use the Dewey Decimal system. I'm not entirely certain but I think Boston Public Library also uses it. They use the Library of Congress method of classifying books.
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
I have been pleasantly surprised at how well the librarians in our small town have adapted. I have overheard them answering questions that I didn't think they would know. The amount of technology that is entering into libraries is almost a necessity, and gladly, the librarians are actually keeping up. This doesn't mean that a little Doom would help the library liven up.
What is this? Are the current generation of college students such intellectual pygmies that they can only manage a single approach to information gathering? (And what's with all this "hold lan parties after hours"? My college library was open 24/7 - go in at 3am on a Saturday morning, and you'd still find a handful of people writing essays.)
Besides which, the interface that a library provides to its patrons couldn't really be any simpler. You get some kind of search tool, which shouldn't be too unfamiliar to the Google generation, which will return a list of books, together with their locations in the library. Go and walk (actual exercise, with your legs) to that location, and you will find it easy to discover similar titles, because your librarian will have shelved them together.
If you're having to call books from the stacks, or from another library, then it's probably because you need a specific book, because you have been referred to it by a person or by another book.
they won't get it. it's like a man in his forties learning chinese so he can understand their customs and culture
and besides, what does a library and computer games have in common? i can see it now:
student: -i'd like a book so i can pass the physics exam
librarian: oooo, i know exactly what you're looking for. this here is half-life episode 6. it's got 10000/5000 screen resolution, multiple object collision, realistic water flow and gravity simulation. what more could you want?
funny pics
I feel that the suggestion to have college libraries host LAN parties is just ridiculous, unless the purpose is to drive up user traffic (which a lot of the time affects funding). It seems to me that hosting LAN parties for gaming is antithetical to the purpose of a library, and would be distracting to people using the library for work (even if it's in a separate, sound-proofed area -- the temptation would be distracting to me, I'm sure). If the library has resources to host parties after hours, then I believe those resources would be much better used keeping the library open for study longer.
As for 24-7 support services, wouldn't that be expensive? And why should a college library offer full services 24-7 other than making life easier for students? I know for certain that when I work late, I don't have full support from staff at my company. I think students should get used to the fact that not all resources at at our fingertips 24-7, and we should not expect them to be. Students need to learn to manage resources well, and that includes dealing with part-time access to them.
I don't ant to sound like I'm going off on a get-off-my-lawn tirade, but I truly feel that libraries should stick to their base functions as information repositories and access points. Does this mean that library use may drop, since the internet has become the prime access point for information among younger people? Sure. But rather than expand the scope of libraries, I'd rather see reduced expenditures (like shared acquisitions {when licensing permits}, more efficient use of technology (why keep all those little-used dead trees around when digital versions are both more useful and cheaper to deal with?).
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
But libraries haven't changed much in the past 2,000+ years. They worked for everyone else. Why have they failed now?
This probably isn't directed at me because I'm old and I live 2 blocks from the local library. I search online to find the book I want, then I place "hold" on it and I receive an email when it is ready for me to pick up.
But I can still find the section in the library where the book WOULD have been shelved and I can go to that location to find what OTHER books are there.
From TFA:
And in most video games we have what is called "the grind". Or "leveling up".
Do we really want to include THAT in the experience of using the library? I don't think so.
The video game analogy breaks down with the library because in the video game you are given tasks to accomplish. The library will not give you any tasks. It is up to YOU to determine what YOU want to do and how YOU define "success".
There is no 10th level reader or 60th level book browser. There is just a collection of materials available for your use.
And there are no cheat codes. You learn it.
Always spawncamping the card catalog.
A digital native would never read an instruction manual with a new game before simply trying the game out, Gee said.
Right. And a library organized by the seat of your pants isn't going to be as useful to natives of either the digital or real world. The reason campus libraries are so useful (and used) is precisely because they have an underlying consistent structure that can handle large collections (one is a requirement of the other). Librarians should certainly be taking cues from any user interface and database systems they can get, including trendy OSs and iWhatever. In my experience many do. And we should all play more too.
=======
Science -- Sealed, Delivered.
Many libraries have become locked in to the sometimes severely lacking systems of a particular vendor and have little control over the interface (in a wider sense). Really this speech needs to be made to the leading vendors.
It's a paradigm shift moment for the storage and cataloguing of information. Google is already exploring new ways of storing, sorting and searching books. Something that until the rise of the computer/database Libraries were pretty much the only entity that did that, and did it well. Libraries are more then just book storage though. They can provide a number of useful community services related to information management, retrieval and knowledge development. Many organizations have been slow to incorporate technology heavily into their operations. Libraries have until recently only used tech to better do tasks and functions that otherwise remained essentially they same as they have been for the past 100 years. I'm unsure as to what the modern library will be like, or even if it will have a physical public location - though I hope they maintain that part. My ideal library would have a number of advanced technologies incorporated - from Tagging and print on demand books to Virtual Reality education and highend computer modelling/simulation software.
The rock, the vulture, and the chain
(Bonus points if you can identify the major US university I'm referring to.)
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
The videogame route is going to lead to clunky Secondlife-esque attempts to reproduce the physical library which gives the worst of both the digital and physical worlds. If any concept needs to be applied to renovating library systems for "digital natives" it's the social networking and recommendation systems. Videogames might represent how the current generation of kids relax, but social networking represents how they gather and spread information.
Being able to see what other people who have taken the same class before have read and found useful would be an example or a shared tagging system. There's some obvious problems that would need to be addressed though. The first obviously being privacy. The second being that most people aren't likely to blog/otherwise document things that aren't that interesting. And the third being that there would be some artificial inflation if they thought other people would be looking ("Of _course_ I read Gödel, Escher, and Bach the first week I got to college.")
Some of the article is just plain common sense like expanding support hours and using IMs/SMS. Other parts lean into bad ideas like the LAN parties. And then there's ideas like this:
With video games, "you can play while you are inept," he said. There is also an assumption that players of games are rewarded for "exploring," even if they don't achieve the goal they have set out to achieve. "Lowered consequences of failure" is a key value to embrace, he said.
There's only so much coddling that young people should get. The world and the workplace do not embrace "lowered consequences of failure" - producing graduates who have that expectation does not do them any favours. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for well designed user interfaces and there's no reason that a user shouldn't be able to sit down at a computer and use an electronic card catalog for 90% of its functionality with no training assuming they've grown up using computers. Sadly, there are some truly terrible ones out there. But there's nothing wrong with a system that requires some effort and some learning in order to get the best results.
Euphemism for BushCo Drones.
If they can't read the directions, fail them.
"Language" as it's used here is a metaphor for the whole digital/computer culture that modern people are steeped in. Basically, they're saying that librarians aren't tech savvy enough, and they need to find some way of participating in the tech culture at a higher level than just "I know what a web page is." Video games might be an example of this, and while I don't necessarily think they're the "best" way to go about it, it will get you more computer facility than taking a bunch of training courses that you'll never put to use.
If you've dealt with a librarian recently, this isn't any surprise to you. They just aren't savvy at what I would consider the "required" level for a position that ought to require extreme information aptitude in this day in age; facility with the Dewey Decimal system ain't going to cut it. You need to know which digital archives are most likely to have pertinent information, and you need to know the best ways to dig through them. You also need to know enough about it that you can help drive intelligent computerization in your library system.
Library sciences is a masters level degree, and it's hard to be a librarian without that degree. They really ought to have a pretty substantial computer requirement, but from what I can tell they don't....Courses like "LBSC 690 Information Technology" would seem to indicate that they actually require some advanced computer work, but looking at the actual syllabus, it looks more like "CS 101 -- How to use Microsoft Office"...That's just not going to cut it.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Seeing as how the subset of "Librarians" is selected from the set of "everyone", why would they know any less, on average, than the average person?
In fact, in my experience they have a deeper understanding of how to SEARCH for information than the average person. It comes from getting requests like "it's that book that was on Oprah a while ago".
And
So what if the librarian's Google-fu is weak? You've already exploited the Internet and have found the exact book you want. So you go to the tech-ignorant librarian and give him/her the exact title, author, publisher, date, etc.
I'm not seeing the problem here.
The only time there WOULD be a problem is:
#1. The person cannot find the book s/he wants.
#2. The person cannot find it on the Internet.
#3. The person cannot effectively communicate WHICH book it is to the librarian.
#4. The librarian cannot understand what that person is saying.
And again, given that librarians are used to vague requests, I'm not seeing that #4 would be much of a barrier.
I meant to say there's no reason why every interface should NOT be as intuitive as possible.
Kind of changes the meaning of the sentence there, eh? Pesky booleans.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
You're in an unfamiliar place.
...... so, where's the problem?
You see a person behind a desk.
Go to desk.
Say "hi"
Hello. How may I help you?
Say "book".
Yes, we have many books here. May I help you find a particular one?
Say "dragon."
Yes, we have a few books on dragons. Would you be interested in any particular subject such as fantasy dragons or pictures of dragons or hunting dragon?
Say "hunting".
Yes, here is a book on how to hunt dragons. If you spend the next 2 hours reading it, you will gain a level in your dragon hunting skill. I will check this book out to you. It is due back in 2 weeks.
Leave.
You have left.
Get soda.
You have a soda.
> librarian, where is "war and peace"? ...
The librarian coos, "Oh, that's a lovely book. I can point you directly to the shelf where it belongs. It's in the basement, near the new Ancient Egypt exhibits."
> north
You are in a twisty maze of Paleology stacks, all alike. > north
You are in a twisty maze of Bolivian Studies stacks, all alike. There is a staircase leading down. > down
I don't understand you.
> go down the stairs
It is dark. You might be eaten by a grue.
> light light I don't understand you.
> turn on flashlight
You are in a twisty maze of Egyptian stacks, all alike. An archway leads east between two papier mache sphynxes.
> east
A janitor yells at you, "Hey! You can't go in there! The exhibit's closed until Monday. But if you fetch me a bottle of whiskey I stashed in the Astronomy stacks on the third floor, I'll let you in."
>
[
Over a decade ago, we were cleaning out a science classroom and found some. It is amazing how far you can sling that part in the middle with a simple flick of the wrist!
Guess what we did with the 8-tracks we found? Hint, it involved a bicycle...
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
They're just lazy and we're letting kids get away with it? God forbid they get off their ass and find a book ... No, we must make it a totally new experience. Despite the fact that libraries didn't really change much in the last 400 years or so
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
All good books should be stored in big crates strewn around the building.
To get to a book, a patron should first find the sledgehammer (hidden in a stall in the men's bathroom), and then crush boxes at random until the right book is found.
It's the only way.
You can't take the sky from me...
Yeah, just like in the old King's Quest games. Or just about anything from Sierra's old line.
Again, just like the old games. If you're looking for the "armourer", you look for the shop with the say saying "armourer".
It's like a trip down Memory Lane.
Just like in the old games. You walk up to EVERY person you see and you talk to them.
The ONLY difference (and this is a BIG one, folks) is that you do NOT pick up everything you find and put it in your pack to see if you can use it later. Aside from that minor point, using the library is EXACTLY like the old video games.
To those who lament the younger generations' lack of knowledge of Dewey Decimal or the inability to do math without a calculator: This is progress.
I don't need to know that 200 is Religion and 300 is Social Sciences. Dewey is for the librarians, not the users. Doing math by calculator is similar. It's kind of like complaining that no one washes dishes by hand anymore because of dishwashers. Or rides horses to work because of cars. Calculators are faster and reduce error. They save time. Move on.
That being said, if you're using the library to do research, you have a lot to learn. Such as the difference in content between a newspaper/magazine, and journal, and a book (and the level of credibility/ peer review); and the difference between print media and the web (how do you cite a blog, a web story with hourly updates...). You still need to learn how to develop a BS radar for using the web for research. Google is great, but someone has to help you learn what information you can trust. And then you still learn the hard way.
Ultimately, librarians simply need to understand that youth are coming to the library as amateur information finders. They already know Google, but not what's relevant. And they have no idea about non-digitized data, how to search it, and often what types of resources are available. For that, there's always the altar of the reference desk.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
There are many ideas that can be generated to revamp libraries in all sorts of fun/interesting/sometimes/boring ways. The most important of which would be to blur the line between information producers and consumers. Consumers produce information via the selections they make, what they look at, what they comment on, and producers naturally are adding content. There are already web services out there that take this into account, slightly: Trexy and Prefound. So, let the users of the library make their own formulations of the content and let them add, comment, tag, or create their own data structures just like in wikis or Ted Nelson's Xanadu.
And make a lot of car analogies.
My twitter
Anyone that grew up with Google ought to be able to find a book in a library. The mental skill set is almost exactly the same. You don't need to memorize the "Dewey Decimal System" to find a book anymore than you need to crawl the web to find a URL.
As parodied here!
Professor Karmadillo Songs of Science
This article is interesting, despite their wide generalizations of gamers, many of which are not really true. If you take out their focus on mentioning video games and gamers every sentence, the article is really about two things.
People aren't having a whole lot of fun in libraries. They suggest: Hold LAN parties, after hours, in libraries. In effect, make the library somewhere that people associate with fun, instead of... not. I don't think this will ever work: people come to the library to find books. If people enjoy reading, they'll enjoy the library. If they just come to do work, then they probably won't. Nothing wrong with that. In my opinion, if you want to make libraries seem like a more fun place, they should have more sections that don't stress silence so much. Of course, people who are trying to work or read quietly, perfectly understandable, but if I'm just leisurely reading and I see someone reading an interesting book, I might want to have a chat with that person. If you go to any bookstore, especially one with a cafe attached, you'll see tons of people reading, drinking coffee and chatting. Why? Silence isn't an enforced rule.
The real substance of the article, though, is about usability. It's not really true that no gamer reads the manual before playing, but the reason that it's not mandatory is because games (especially console games) have a common interface. If you're playing on the 360, you know the controller layout, it's just a matter of pushing a button and seeing what it does. PC games can be a bit more complicated, and I would argue that most people tend to read the readme or look at the Controls option in the game to find out what the controls are. Libraries without a doubt could use a usability overhaul. A requisite link for talking about usability is Don Norman's publications.
As a sidenote, I really hate the term "Digital Natives". I hope it doesn't catch on.
Computers are great tools, but they're still just tools. Where's the gd card catalog so I can find what I'm looking for. Hell, I'm only 27, grew up with computers, but the morons writing the Library Catalog systems have obviously never seen the inside of real library, let alone done research in one. If you want tech based research, use Wikipedia to find your 1st or 2nd hand sources and go from there. If your going to the library, learn how the library works. It's been around for a VERY long time and works QUITE well, if you know what you're doing. Learn how to use the tool you're trying to use and, miracle of miracles, it'll be easier to use.
First you have to define or pick the quest.
Then you have to learn how to use tools and weapons, and earn your way to them.
Then you either get the librarian on your side to battle who knows what to get the information (or maybe just pick it up incidentally along the way), or you have to fight the librarian, and if you win, you get the information; if you lose, they stand over you beating you with a velver covered Webster's Unabridged, going, "Shhhh!!!!!!"
But speakers said that there was a larger split between students -- who are "digital natives," in one popular way of classifying people based on their experience with technology -- and librarians, who are more likely to be "digital immigrants." They may have learned the language, but it's a second language.'"
So what does that make me, who was born in 1952, saw his first computer at age 12, had no more interaction with a computer except for punch cards until 1982 when I bought my first computer (at age 30), got on Compuserve in 1983, the BBSes in 1988 and the internet in 1997 and who builds his own computers and knows several programming languages including Z80 assembly?
A digital pioneer? I must be, you freakin' (second and third generation) natives are still shooting arrows in my back!
If I'm a digital pioneer what do you call the guy who was programming mainframes back in 1965?
-mcgrew
I've used library computer systems in many states and cities, and don't find anything wrong with the systems they have. You type in the [keyword/title/author], get a list of hits, get the catalog number and go get it from the shelf - been that way since the 80s, and in fact closely resembles Google. Now we'll have the "information architect" idiots messing up perfectly good systems with their digital fung shui, and then you won't be able to use the system after that because it will be like a Doom level with the library mapped in it and too much noise and too slow and crashing and a Clippy pop up in the corner every five seconds.
TFA: "the stations of the cross"; "altar of the reference desk"
Can somebody get a chronometer to check what color the sky is in the world these morons live in? I haven't seen heads shoved so far up asses since they were saying that scrolling down a web page "feels like drowning" and so compelled a whole generation of web designers to cram the entire page "above the fold".
How does this relate to the iPhone? I think it will change the way people use libraries.
You have no problem understanding and or using the Dewey Decimal System; but it is a far reach to say that the younger generation is asking for the output of that system to be 'handed to them', and that they have the impression they have 'no need to learn anything'.
Regardless of what system is used, be it Dewey Decimal or Library of Congress the fact of the matter is that there are some number of books that are sorted in a possibly arbitrary way, which a user can reference via said arbitrary way or system's interface. The Dewey Decimal system and card catalogs are a labor intensive way of sorting and referencing books - is that necessary any more? My argument is no; computer systems are cheap enough and should be sophisticated enough that the user should not be concerned with the mechanics of it. It should be entirely opaque, because the ideal user is there to spend their time with the content, not the sorting mechanism.
On some level librarians are recognizing this, and we should to. The Dewey Decimal System is cruft for the majority of users. However we get to the next iteration of literature management, be it by video games or some other method, recognize that the old way of doing it was predicated on a different framework of resources, and there is a better way of doing it - one motivated by cutting to the task on hand - as we do in so much of the rest of our lives these days - not by being whiny teenagers.
[Ego]out
Won't this cause an outbreak of Librarian violence?
>What we are talking about is that librarians frequently know jack diddly shit about computers.
Even tfa grants that libraries and librarians have historically been much faster to adopt computers and computer-related technologies before the unwashed-masses. so you are either trolling or are having a completely separate conversation elsewhere. Librarians frankly understand and can use computers much more adeptly than these "Digital Natives" which is where the 'problem' appears to lie.
it is now being decried as unacceptable to providing all the necessary information to the user in an easy to look up form, that simple expectation is apparently too much. How is it that with every generation the rate of ADD/ADHD continues to rise, and yet they appear to be even lazier than ever?
simply put, based on query the collage starts, including related or more often than not unrelated cookies influencing the collage. As the multimedia collage unfolds the GUI is three buttons, D for Data A for Audio and V for Video, the controller has these three buttons included and the user controls the edits per second, like a pitch control on a deck, as well as the transition lengths on another pitch control like device. as the collage unfolds the buttons are used to mark whatever the user finds interesting, each one nested in a subscreen around the main screen each screen per letter of alphabet. they can refine their search as they continue in it, i responded to the site where this article link takes you, maybe it will get shown maybe not. either way, this idea has been in my head for eleven years, glad to see its inevitable surfacing.
Haven't they heard ?
Google's replacing the worlds libraries with datacenters.
Seal your Playboys in vaccuum bags now kiddies, specially ones with pages stuck together, for if you don't your grandkids may never appreciate how good they have it.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A (Start)
Press select before you press start, and you can get 30 free books for your friend, too.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
"digital natives"
Would anyone ever knowingly refer to themselves as a "digital native"?
I didn't think so.
At least it isn't "e-natives"...
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
I agree that part of learning to be a scholar is learning to use the tools of the scholar. But at the time the online tools of the scholar were developed, librarians were thinking in terms of replicating a paper system, not making the best possible use of the digital world.
IANALibrarian, but I worked as a cataloger and cataloger team lead in the early '90s, entering card catalogs, books, and other media into online databases for a vendor that serviced libraries. Many of the people I supervised or worked beside held or were seeking their MLS degrees, and at the time cataloging was respected among librarians as perhaps the most technically demanding part of their degree. I was informed last year by a librarian/cataloger colleague that the curent tendency is more and more to outsource cataloging to highly trained non-librarians, and that schools are starting to drop cataloging as a requirement to obtain a library science degree.
While there, I participated in a brainstorming session developing new services for libraries, and improving information accessibility (this was 1992). Among the suggestions given were scanning books, creating new ways of searching for data, creating new interfaces, allowing searches outside the library itself, and many more. Anything involving redesigning presentation of cataloging data was shot down because "people are used to the card catalog system." The idea that new users might want a different way, or that old users might profit by an improved approach and embrace it, was not supported.
The problem lies in the fact that librarians tend to categorize within existing systems. Even librarians who have migrated into the web world do this. I sat on a meeting discussing user interface for a personalized telecommunications site, and two people actually argued that the user interface should be identical to the directories storing the content. Those two were the sole librarians on the team, and the rest of us had to explain that the core concept of personalization (and indeed a major strength of the internet) is that content can be presented effectively in a broad variety of ways. One of them continued to resist, nonetheless, not comprehending that the architecture taxonomy did not need to equal the UI taxonomy (although of course it affected what was possible).
I agree wholeheartedly that learning to use library tools is part of learning to be a scholar. I think librarians serve an invaluable purpose. But I do think there is a hidebound tendency, which is being shown in the tendency to diminish the emphasis on online technical competency (not requiring cataloging for MLS degrees) and the tendency to dismiss the potential for improved interfaces out of hand.
Back when I taught computer classes for the local library, I don't think there was a soul under 50 in them. Of course, I taught during the day, so I guess everyone else was at school or work.
:-)
They were generally pretty good students and caught on quickly enough once they had someone show them what to do.
P.S. It's a good thing to do for your community if you have time. Besides, it's fun to stand in front of a group of people who could be your grandparents and point out that, although you're not yet thirty, you've been using computers for the last twenty years
http://www.city.newport-beach.ca.us/nbpl/
You can reserve books over the internet, seach for books, check the status, they will email you when books you have are coming due. Numerous Terminals all over the Library to search for books and self-checkout of books. Fantastic Library.
> (Bonus points if you can identify the major US university I'm referring to.)
Northwestern.
Either that, or there's more than one of those.
2*3*3*3*3*11*251
The last thing I need to hear is an old granny librarian saying "n00b, I totally pwned j00!" to a colleague.
Frankly, I think this article is somewhat a load of junk. Learning how to use a library isn't exactly difficult, even when resorting to the "traditional" card catalog method. If students aren't able to learn the basics of using a library, there's something else *severely* wrong with the educational system.
That said, there *ARE* plenty of ways that libraries can be made more accessible to the younger generation.
For instance, the library at the university I attend requires that their reference staff be accessible by e-mail or Instant Message during their desk hours. With more and more journals and databases being online, this makes perfect sense.
I've used the Instant Message service countless times, and it's amazingly convenient.
Last year, I worked on a paper dealing with a somewhat obscure topic. The reference desk librarian wasn't able to find any journals or anthologies off the top of his head that addressed the topic, and told me he'd get back to me in a day. By the next morning, he had e-mailed several professors who he thought might be familiar with the topic, who in turn referred me to two graduate students who had written papers on similar topics, who then happily supplied me with the list of sources they had consulted.
Libraries don't need to be 'hip'. They need to be accessible.
Of course, stimulating the intellectual curiosity necessary to get people into libraries is a different ballgame entirely. (We also do have a 'popular reading' section, that in addition to popular books and movies, contains scholarly works that tie in closely to books or films, which can be a fascinating follow-up to books like The DaVinci Code or Freakonomics)
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
As if librarians weren't hot enough- let's make them play video games. Mmm.
I would think some librarians would be interested in the literary aspect of video games. Some video games have really good stories and character development. Off the top of my head, these come to mind: Final Fantasy 12, the (new) Prince of Persia series, Myst, etc. etc (please add to the list!)
I have the fabled Master's in Library Science, which has never brought me anything good. The library field has been in a tailspin since the eighties, with librarians coming up with perpetual new ideas to try and make themselves valid again, and failing miserably. And as typical of dying field jobs don't pay well and are hard to come by--three years on a job hunt isn't out of the ordinary.
It's bad enough the only jobs that open up are mainly for directors and department heads, and that to be successful it helps to have a second Master's in a technological field as a subject specialty, or that if you want to fit in you better listen to NPR and vote Democrat or else, my big issue is they also obsess about the "teaching" requirement.
At the academic level most librarians are considered professors, and in order to be a professor one has to teach. However, the only teaching librarians do is those "how to use a library" courses for incoming students once a semester or so.
So today that little bit of "teaching" is hyped out of all proportion. On top of that, the librarians are trying to connect with the hip-n-young youth and falling flat on their faces. Librarians are expected now to have MySpace and Facebook web pages, and use "new techniques" to "teach" via Second Life. So now we'll have video games, eh? Sure, make finding info as fun as a first person shooter--just most librarians are anti-gun and anti-violence and proud to share their opinions with you or anyone else who'll give a damn. Think more like a politically correct Myst and you'll get it.
So I go back now to sending out resumes in my quest for a low paying librarian job because I can't afford to go back to school, and wondering why I even bother. But at least now I can put on my resume I know video games.......
Whats a library? Let me check wikipedia,one moment.
play video games? ok, maybe but it seems like librarians should start using p2p to become familiar.
A hand up and a foot on every chest...
This is a trend in the making as I've seen several other instances where this is being attempted. For example, the NY Times had an article on a CRM that was designed with "gaming" in mind and incorproates many elements without it compromising the primary mission of the tool, making "gaming elements" obvious and other important distinctions (article now requires login, though http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/20/business/yourmon ey/20proto.html?_r=1&oref=slogin)
My point is there is something to be said for incorporating some of the same engaging elements game producers use into library systems. I'm not talking about an actual game rather elements. It sounds silly and off the cuff but what if there was a social media aspect to it where you could decide to make your library profile public and people could see the last few books you read? Maybe you could also comment on them? Compare the time it took for you to read a book against your peers? You could have some fun with this, dramatically increase involvement and still accomplish the library's primary mission.
That's just my POV... no more, no less.