NOTE: I have a new My Word's Worth column at http://marylaine.com/myword/acclearn.html which muses on the question of how much of what we know we learned by accident.
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STOP THE WORLD, I WANT TO CATCH UP
by Marylaine Block
I have a question for my librarian readers: how do you keep up with the changes in our technologies? I genuinely want you to send me your answers because one of the chapters in the book I'm working on is how librarians deal with the rapidity of change.
Perhaps, like me, you became a librarian because you love putting people together with the books and magazines and newspapers and children's literature and information they need, and now you find that you're expected to be expert at troubleshooting your computers, creating web pages, using scanners and PhotoShop and Power Point (all of which keep adding new features). Now, perhaps, you're being told you have to do virtual reference on a chat system.
You may have learned HTML just in time to be told that you need to learn XML; you may have no sooner learned all the intricacies and interfaces of a database and designed tip sheets for students than the vendor changes it; you've no sooner taught a class on search engines when you learn that one has gone out of business, one is no longer free, one came back from a near-death experience, and the others have added new features.
AAAAAACK!!
How do you cope? How do you find out about new hardware, software, databases, web utilities, search engines, web sites, preservation techniques, and coding protocols? Who do you trust to tell you which ones matter? How do you learn to use them?
How do you "learn the web"? Now there's an overwhelming concept all by itself -- Google indexes three billion pages now.
Our traditional ways of keeping up with changes in the profession and learning better ways to do our work are our professional associations, conferences, trade publications, and serious journals. Now, I suspect the mix includes, and, because of their immediacy, even favors, discussion forums and listservs, blogs, e-zines, and the web pages they refer us to.
I know that I rely on blogs for news and links to important sites and stories. I still attend conferences (especially when somebody pays me to speak there) and listen to speakers talking at length about new systems and ideas; it's great to have a chance to talk with them afterward about the questions I have, not to mention a chance to see what vendors are offering at the exhibits. I rely on e-zines and print magazines for lengthier explanations and research studies. [If you'd like to see what I read daily and weekly to keep up, check out my personal bookmarks page at http://marylaine.com/home.html.]
I rely on e-mail subscriptions to Search Day [http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/] and Search Engine Watch [http://searchenginewatch.com/] and Research Buzz [http://www.researchbuzz.com/] to keep up with changes in search engines and their capabilities. I rely on certain listservs and announcement services to keep me up on new sites on the web -- my New on the Net page at http://marylaine.com/netnew.html has links to my usual suspects.
I know what I do to cope with onrushing technological change. I DON'T know what you do, and I need to know that for my book. Please send your own strategies and sources to: marylaine at netexpress.net.
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COOL QUOTE
Consider how much of your life, your worktime and your playtime involves interacting with IP products, with software and media and information and entertainment. Now consider what it would mean to have your every move through that digital swamp tracked and recorded, all in the name of enforcing copyright. It would mean the Viacoms and the Disneys and the News Corporations of the very near future would own great volumes of information about your comings and goings, enormous databases full of your private life.
This is not a life anyone in the Western world can opt out of, remember. Choosing to avoid computers, music, television or movies brands you a crank, an eccentric. Avoiding all of them and still participating in society at large is completely out of the question.
Bret Dawson. "The Privatization of our Culture." Shift. http://shift.com/mag/10.1/html/10.1feature001a.asp
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You are welcome to copy and distribute or e-mail any of my own articles for noncommercial purposes (but not those by my guest writers) as long as you retain this copyright statement:
Ex Libris: an E-Zine for Librarians and Other Information Junkies.
http://marylaine.com/exlibris/
Copyright, Marylaine Block, 1999-2002.
[Publishers may license the content for a reasonable fee.]
