There are three important things for today:
1. The ALA has released its State of America’s Libraries report (discovered via the Library Link of the Day).
2. Nicole Engard has a great post from the Computers in Libraries Conference, reporting from two related presentations on the future of the catalog (featuring Tim Spalding of LibraryThing and Roy Tennant of OCLC). From Roy’s presentation,
In the new world order, discovery will be disaggregated from the ILS (Google, Open WorldCat, meta search, others). This makess sense because users typically want to find anything they can on a topic. Now we have to explain that you have to look in different places for articles. People don’t like pain so they want to search in one spot and if they can’t then they won’t use your tool.
And for the record, I find the phrase “new world order” (to describe our ever-evolving information environment) interesting, to say the least.
3. LibrarianInBlack also points to “Teens, Privacy, and Online Social Networks,” a study by the Pew / Internet & American Family Life Project. It turns out that our teens are way smarter than some of us think.
