I feel compelled to start by stating that I have a few troubles with New Age thinking. Those poor sods starving to death in the drought torn wastes of Africa can visualise roast dinners until the cows don't home and they will still be watching their children starve and die. And don't get me started on Darfur.
I think The secret and books of this ilk are actively damaging to a certain proportion of the population. (i.e. those who take it seriously.) All of the Staff of this Library can follow the steps and see their future as Chief Librarian but unless the Council decides to promote thirty people and permit democratic leadership all the planning and thinking in the world will still leave us with one Manager and twenty-nine disappointed dreamers.
What has this to do with Library 2.0 you could be forgiven for thinking? Bear with me.
Last week at our Staff Meeting we were presented with ABS xylophone graphs generated from the last Census which shows that Sunshine has the second lowest level of literacy (Dandenong owns first place), no surprises there, second lowest rate of households with connection to the internet (high five to Dandenong again) and once again no great surprise there, but we also have, and this is the surprise, the lowest rate of car ownership.
Got the picture? No car in this wide brown land. Not owning - or more accurately, not in the process of paying off, 'cos I'd be surprised if those on the mid to upper levels of socio-economic success own all of those people movers out there - a family car would be high on my list of indicators of folks doing it hard. Howard's Battlers as it were.
So my perspective on the reading I have done about Web 2.0 has been filtered through my perception and understandings of the area in which I work, because looking at this excercise from a professional and not a personal perspective I see our Library Staff who are educated, intelligent folks with a start up level of computer literacy and no restrictions (i.e. our patrons are permitted internet bookings of an hour a day) spending many, many happy hours tinkering (and frequently cussing) at the tasks and challenges of this 2.0 training program.
I cannot for the life of me see how our patrons are going to find the time - once they have done their emails and job applications - to use the 2.0 applications. The tools are excellent and if our Patrons have a home computer then all is well and you'll get no arguments from me about the value of these tools but the reality check for the residents of Sunshine is that mostly they don't.
Abrams bold statement that we will all have an avatar by the year 2012 chills me by its failure to define who 'we' consists of. It seems to me that 'we' are the middle to upper classes of employed, educated folks with the finances to furnish our home with a new computer (and upgrade it every few years) and the knowledge to get antiviral, antispam, antispyware, antiphishing programs loaded the minute we first plug in to the net and then the leisure time to spend pursuing delightful activities within the online communities.
Casual observation tells me that the bulk of our Patrons who aren't applying for work, massaging their resumes before applying for work or checking their emails in the hope that there's some positive feedback about work alongside a few emails from their families and friends so far, far away, spend their time in chat rooms.
The web 2.0 training is surprisingly short on the how tos of managing chat rooms.
Lest you think I'm being too negative here let me add that the Brains Trust (age 15) thought Abrams map of the 2.0 world one of the cleverest things he'd seen in a while, and is finding much of what I am passing on to him to be of interest and use, so possibly the best use of 2.0 for this work environment is going to consist of those at the Info Desk drawing Patrons attention to useful applications when they can see that there might be a use for them in specific cases. (I have long done this with the SLV's excellent list of search engines, complete with links, that all students go 'WOW' over becasue they had no idea such a useful page existed on the SLV website.)
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2 comments:
I agree with your perspectives on Web 2.0 and our patrons.
Currently there is a project going on where a company is making laptops available to third world countries for very cheap ($100/laptop if I recall correctly). The theory is that the governments of the country will buy a big bunch of them and send them to schoolhouses around the nation to use. The laptops are tailor made to be tough (they can be dropped, submerged in water, hit with a hammer, etc etc). They also come with a hand generated battery (turn the wheel and it charges the battery) as well as a way of connecting a solar panel to charge it. It's an ambitious program but, if you look around, there are a heap of people against it (we should give them tools to farm, not tools to search the net).
Just thought you might be interested, I can post some articles on this if you'd be interested in having a read, as a long term plan it might mean that the world would become more 'connected' and online tools would have a much greater focus in everyone's lives (or it could fail miserably and the digital divide could become insurmountable).
C
Finally someone who remembers what libraries are for. I agree with you and I hope all this technology doesn't make us forget why libraries are here. To help people who need it, to offer services to the community who can't afford these services at home. If we continue with this self check out stuff I hope we do not lose our patrons who may feel overwhelmed with this technology.
Laptops in third world countries, what about food. Just a thought.
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