Technoschism: Stephen Abram

Technoschism: Reorganizing and Restructuring Libraries for the Real Future
Stephen Abram, Sirsi-Dynix

Slow change? My eye.
[While the technology rebooted, we discussed Google and how search engine optimizers manipulate the hits you get. News to me, which is sad. Must learn more about this.]
Library core skills is not information - libraries improve the quality of the question and the experience
Information Ocean, not highway. Exploration space, not a collection space.
We must be about more than the books, we must be about the entire experience.
"We librarians have to learn when we study something to death, Death was not the original goal!"

• Epaper & eReaders withfullsize screens
• Light-based keyboards & fullsize monitors
• Projectors the size of sugar cubes
• June 2007 - every cable and phone wire will have switched over to broadband
• iReader
• iPhone & other full-service phones (G3 standard)M/li>
Web on a credit card
• Everything is getting smaller - we need to get there in the first wave

We can't teach people to flush....how are we going to teach them Boolean logic?

• Advice #1: Go XML for Dominant Personal Services -- XML senses the device and changes to fit
• All that matters is: Community, Learning, Interaction -- he collected stories to create personas and there was no overlap between the stories the librarians told about what was important and what the users said was important
• Intention Paths -- is your library website a closed Swiss Army knife? Make sure that your website information such that it works
• You can't make it too simple

• Advice #2: Understand JSR168, Portlets and RSS
• 250 million books go online in the next five years -- what then? A chapter and paragraph-level economy on books, and how do we integrate ourselves into that?
• Get our heads out of the book -- books aren't at risk, librarians are at risk
• Get realistic about the role of reading in electronic environments

Stephen really serves Google, but only in the way of enlightening us. If half of what he says is true, Google knows all.]

• Advice #3: Geton the OpenURL and FedSearch Wagon -- give yourself and your users search options that don't harvest your information in the process of helping you search
• Let Google do the Who, What, Where, When questions. Librarians can focus on the How and Why questions. Let librarians focus on their specialties and expertises and promote themselves, let them become experts.
• What librarians do best is context management, not content management

• Advice #4: GPS & Broadband: Deal With It, Act Local?
• Google knows where your users are and can tailor their services to the local level.

• Advice #5: Be ready for advanced social networks
• Are you ready for Web 2.0/Library 2.0?
• Libraries are about communities and environments, not single-functions like the social software
• We need to create environments and provide information that delight our users
• We need to have a discussion about this, not about making OPAC suck less
• Use del.icio.us and wikis to share and preserve the knowledge of reference libriarans

Get your texthead to nexthead: What is your strategy for dealing with the death of DVDs, CDs, cassettes, etc.?

Types of learners: experience learners, visual learners, audio learners, text learners. How do we support the full range of learning, of learning styles?

• Advice #6: Get social
• BiblioCommons -- Canada's answer to all of this.
• We have an entire generation socially networking for life. We need to be out there -- facebook.com seems to be one of the strongest contenders.
• Ning.com has a Library 2.0 group.
• ActiveWorlds and SecondLife virtual worlds getting thousands of questions a night, -- there is a huge library presence: teaching, answering questions, book discussions.....everything that we do in Real Life we do there.
• Magazine Content, News Content...it's all becoming social. How do we insert ourselves into the social content map?

• Advice #7: Get political
• Become an advocate in all the places that we are being social
• These millenials will be voting on our bond issues in the next ten years, we NEED them

• Advice #8: Reorganize
• E-learning
• Information Commons
• Learning Commons
• Community Integration
• Reference Cowboys
• Virutal Operations and Branches -- your virtual visitors are completely different than your in-person visitors

• Advice #9: Get Conversational
• Instant Messaging reference *works* -- Thomas Ford Memorial Library gets 50% of their total reference through IM
• Cha-Cha
• IM is better than email for reference

• Advice #10: Increase our HR ability to adapt
• Everything is a toy...play with them -- we learn through play
• Use the PLCMC Lerarning 2.0 model as a structure to play in
• "information literacy" courses are like "ugly salons"
• Use the same list as a checklist of things you can do
• The culture of the library changes as this happens
• Build a petting zoo in the library so that the public can learn to play on these technologies

Brains have changed in millenials (3rd shift in brain mapping). We need to shift our ways of providing services to match their brains.

SchoolRooms -- built based on reports on how millenials think. User-centered design.

Are you ready for Imagineering the Library? Are we ready to be the purple cow?
It's the staff that distinguishes us from the search engines? People live in the foothills of the information ocean, and libraries can be there.

Change for our users in the context of learning and community.

[Wow, Stephen Abram is wonderful. I'm glad I've finally gotten the chance to see him speak.]