On Thursday I had an interesting conversation with Kevin, a colleague, about the future of libraries. Don’t get me wrong. I still love instruction; I still think it’s important and a clearly growing part of the academic library’s mission. But we were talking about something bigger.
The web is changing in incredible ways. With the introduction of Ajax and numerous social software programs, the actual nature of the web is unbelievably different than it was just a few years ago. How do these changes impact information seekers?
When teaching a class about web searching the other day I realized just how different things are. When I was learning about the internet, it was early enough in the game (and I was old enough) to have to learn a little about how the computer “thought.†It doesn’t know you’re typing “cat,†it knows that you’re typing the characters “c,†“a,†and “t†in order, and it looks for those characters in order on the pages it’s indexed.
Today’s students don’t need to understand how a computer thinks. You type “kitens†and Google will ask you if you meant “kittens.†It’s pretty easy to see why students might think the computer and/or internet may actually understand the word you’re typing enough to recommend a new spelling and maybe even the meaning of “kittens†or the word you’re typing. Maybe it would know to look at “mammal,†“kitten,†“kittens,” and “pet.â€
I’m not saying anything negative about the current generation of students, just that they come to research with a fundamentally different understanding of the web, based on their life experiences which (though are just 4-8 years younger than me) are radically different.
With the rise of ajax and layered pages, how does an instructor explain the layout of the internet to someone so that they’ll know how to cite it? If someone hasn’t experienced the basic file-structure of URLs, how can you teach them to navigate to a higher level in the page? If Google keeps getting better and better, how can you convince someone that it’s important to learn how to be critical of the results and look elsewhere if they’re not getting their desired responses from their first search?
Libraries are at an exciting threshold. I think the most exciting thing librarians can possibly be doing is finding ways to make libraries relevant to students who are used to flashy webpages, getting information quickly, and finding information on their own. How do we remain interesting and relevant enough to get them through the doors? Once we get them in there, how do we help them be more critical of the information that they find? How important is it that they physically come through the doors? Hopefully, this is an area I’ll be able to examine with some of my summer course work.
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