I’m slated to give a presentation to a bunch of librarians next week entitled “15 New Technologies in 50 Minutes.” I’m putting together my list, and here’s my dilemma: What constitutes “new”?
There are technologies that have been out there for a while — blogs, Flickr, YouTube — that aren’t at all new to me or anyone who’s interested in Web 2.0-type stuff, but there are still librarians who haven’t played around with them at all. The actually new things I’ve identified (Nintendo Wii, iPhone, downloading content to my TiVo from Amazon) aren’t immediately library-relevant, but does that matter? Is the point of this session to teach people about tools they can use right now in their jobs? Or is it to familiarize people with the things their patrons might ask about so they don’t look at them like they’re crazy?
Now that I’ve written that down, I think it’s the latter. There’s just too much to say about blogs and wikis and such that’s actually useful on a day-to-day basis to fit in a session this short. So a whirlwind tour it is.