I am amazed at how uninformed many people are about libraries and the role they play today. Are libraries/librarians going away? Nope! The role of the traditional librarian is giving way to the dynamic new role of information specialist. School librarians are now teacher librarians. All librarians are tasked with the challenge of promoting information literacy. In an increasingly digital world, many individuals are lacking knowledge regarding the process of obtaining reliable information on the Web and elsewhere. In the same way that many people believe what they see on TV, many believe much of what they find on the Internet. One of the many roles that librarians play is to help people wade through the plethora of information resources that exist in the world today and to help equip them with the skills needed to distinguish between resources that are questionable and those which are authoritative and reliable. And the list goes on...
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I would eventually like this blog to be a resource for the technical services department I work in at my library. There are various generations of people working in my department and many are struggling to keep up with the rapid changes in technology. As a millennial, I have a different perspective than many of my coworkers who are in their 40's and 50's. I often find it much easier to learn about new technologies and to adopt them and use them in my daily life. For example, I can't live without Facebook, but many of my coworkers are either still trying to figure out what purposes it can serve or are opposed to it all together.
Together, as a department, we are about to embark upon our own 23 Things Training Program. This was the idea of my boss, a recent graduate of USF's LIS program. It will begin the first week of January 2011 and run through the first week of June, with one item covered each week for 23 weeks. I hope that what I have learned in this class and through my own exploration of Web 2.0 technologies will help me to answer any questions that my coworkers might have about certain tools. While we will be looking at many of the things I examined for this class, such as blogs, wikis and more, we will also be looking at LibGuides, Adobe Pro, Scholar Commons, Cross Ref, and more library-specific things.
