Thursday, September 13, 2007

Brave New World

Thing 15

Somehow, in my haste to do many fun things, I left out my thoughts on Web 2.0. I read all the perspectives and after the first one, "Away from the icebergs", I felt like I had crashed into one. Overall some good points are made.
  • The library must go with the times and become more accessible to everyone. We can't keep all the books we might like "just in case" (of course BCPL always knew that!).

  • We can't train everybody. The commentator suggests that our technology should be made easier to use so that we don't have to teach everybody how to use it. I think this is a great idea on paper (online) but in reality, face to face, we have many people who are still just figuring out how to click the mouse and use an online catalog (or any catalog). So I think we are still going to have to teach people the basics. People still want human contact to help them navigate.

  • We seem to be making progress in connecting with more people online. But we should keep in mind that there is still a population out there who don't have the money or the means to use a computer at home. Some people (older?) don't want to deal with the technology at all.

No comments: