Summary
The chapter from Kochtanel and Matthews provides “an overview of the evolution of technology and its impact on the application of computing systems in libraries.” The authors trace the development of computing technology used in libraries through the 20th century to the present day, and show how the trend has been for different services that were once separate to be more and more unified in their presentation to the end user – a process that is still ongoing.
The authors identify five applications that collectively form the LIS domain: integrated library systems, online databases, Web-based resources, digital library collections, and e-books and online journals. The development of these applications has been made possible by concurrent improvements in the hardware, software, and telecommunications capabilities available for libraries to use.
Comments
This article was an interesting read in part because it laid out the development of integrated library systems and made reference to the different aspect of library services they bring together. For those of us accustomed to seeing these systems only from the viewpoint of end users, it can be difficult to tell that they’re not perfectly seamless until we know where to look for the seams. When we see a Web interface that purports to draw all these applications together as an integrated whole, it can be surprising and disorienting to find that they don't yet work as well together as they could - for example, when a well-designed front page leads into a clunky and obscure online catalog.
Hirshon, Arnold. "Environmental Scan: A Report on Trends and Technologies Affecting Libraries." Southborough, MA: Nelinet, 2008.
Summary
Hirshon’s article is an assessment of the state of current trends and new technologies in information science and how they might affect libraries. The author highlights developments in five areas: society and economy, technology, education and learning, information content, and library leadership and organization. Most of the issues he brings up stem from the development of new technologies.
Most notable among these new technology trends are mobile computing (spurred in part by the explosive success of the iPhone, and even more ubiquitous now than in 2008), social networking, the use of e-books, and the increasing availability of high-density and high-performance computing for less and less cost. These are interrelated with trends in the ways people work and learn using technology, with collaborative peer-edited projects like Wikipedia, free sources of information like the open source software movement or digitized books, and so on.
Comments
The issue of e-books does intrigue me. There are obvious benefits to digital versions of texts – the text can be easily transferred between media, it isn’t limited by a set number of physical copies, it’s freed from concerns about book condition and preservation – but I have always found them less easy to use than printed books. For one thing, most people don’t own a dedicated e-book reader and must view e-books on a standard computer monitor. Computers are not as easily portable as books (even laptops require a power source), they’re much more prone to cause eyestrain than are books, and because they are multifunction machines, they come with a whole set of distractions built right in – like having a little TV screen in the back of every library book! E-books are also more ephemeral than printed matter, and fundamentally less satisfying to own – as attached to technology as today’s readers may be, the human attachment to owning physical things will, I think, persist.
I'm skeptical about the author’s assertion that electronic gaming is a useful teaching tool. He claims that today’s young people, avid consumers of games, view games as educational and “convert the new knowledge that they gain from the games into their subsequent actions.” As an avid consumer of video games myself, I cannot say I’ve ever encountered the attitude among my gaming peers that we’re getting life lessons from our games. Although gaming has shifted from a hobby activity to a mainstream entertainment, gamers still overwhelmingly play for the sheer fun of it. Games have infiltrated much of daily life, but only as pleasant distractions – and I don’t see that changing in the near future. Not many people fire up a video game because they want to be educated.
Discussion questions
Both my discussion questions are drawn from Hirshon's srticle:
1. What are the benefits and drawbacks of integrating gaming technologies into libraries?
2. What could be done to make e-books more accessible to the average library patron?
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