Whenever I read what the people on the cutting edge are writing about the Web, Library 2.0, and the learning environment in general, I am both fascinated and terrified.... I don't know nearly enough.
And my guiding questions at this point couldn't be more basic: What do I need to know? and Where can I learn it? Clearly, I need some kind of technological guru. But back to the topic.
I have no doubt that libraries need to be transforming themselves in the way that Michael Stephens and Dr. Shultz describe. The young people already know that. Older people tend to think the Web 2.0 is such a radical shift from the learning environment as we know it that it blows apart all our previous schema--that reading and writing will be replaced with other skills (waving your arms in the air to design a new engine, for example) but we need to recognize that reading and writing are actually more frequently used skills in the online world, and that by not acknowledging that fact we are creating a schism between us and our students which threatens to send us all to purgatory. (Sorry, I recently read A Distant Mirror by Barbara Tuchman and was fascinated by the fighting between the pope and ant-pope in the Middle Ages.) By that I mean, we are failing to teach all we should and the students are failing to learn all they need to. But I'm getting a little off topic.
Libraries will change physically. Print will be less important, computer and information delivery systems more important. And, yes, it saddens me. Some of my earliest memories are of browsing local libraries. One was housed temporarily in the basement of the fire station with books stacked haphazardly here and there. And some of those books were musty. Maybe eventually our physical collections will become caches of nostalgic sensory input ("Wow, smell this book!" or "Do you think this paper was originally this brown?")
One thing for sure: whatever Age we're in, it's quickly morphing into something else.
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