Electronic Textbooks

Stumbled across an interesting article in the Chronicle of Higher Education concerning students reluctance to try electronic books, see the link below.  On one hand, I would have thought the younger generation would have readily adopted e-books. That may be an unfair observation but it's based on the high end phones I see in use by our current students and what they seem to be doing with them.  This dinosaur has only recently attempted texting and found that I can't type very well with my thumbs on a keyboard the size of a credit card.  I haven't a clue what most of the acronyms I receive mean and aren't sure I want to learn a new language. The more I look, I wonder if those high tech phone users are really only a very small, but highly visible, sampling of the overall student population.

I do remember having to haul a backpack with 20 pounds of books and supplies around as a commuter student and thinking there had to be a better way.  I would have liked to trade a 3 lb iPad or Kindle for that burden I found myself with but I also remember taking copious notes in the margins to highlight some point I thought significant.  Since most of my college textbooks still reside on my bookshelf, the resale advantage wasn't a factor for me, but long term retention certainly was.  I wonder what the shelf life of an e-book is? 

http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/students-remain-reluctant-to-try-e-textbooks-survey-finds/27866?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

The Future of Books

What will books look like in the future?  Will we still have paper books or will the electronic formats become the primary method of publishing?  Wonder what that will mean for the future of the library as a brick and mortar building?  Want a say in the outcome?  If you were in Australia, you'd have your chance.  I encourage you to visit the link below to see what the Book Industry Strategy Group is doing down under.  I find it interesting that any government formed a focus group to ask these types of questions.  Any parallel undertaking here in the US?

http://www.innovation.gov.au/Section/Industry/Pages/BookIndustryStrategyGroup.aspx

Twitter Survey Report

Stumbled across this report this morning and thought it interesting.  I'd thought of twitter as being more of an informal social interaction medium, but it seems a lot of faculty are using it to share information and research with peers.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/37621209/2010-Twitter-Survey-Report

The future of the library

After watching the video on the future of the book (http://vimeo.com/channels/ideo#15142335) and then watching a couple of other videos from IDEO, I came away with a few thoughts:

• The freedom of having patrons "who are comfortable with BETA" (Paul Bennett at the Economist Conference) who understand and are comfortable with change in progress toward a positive goal....

• Patrons who expect multi (-tasking, -functionality) look forward to "mashups" like the coffeehouse in the library; group rather than individual projects...

• What if our patrons thought of the library as a center of Information/Learning/Ideas with a lot of books rather than just a place with a lot of books....

just some thoughts for my first entry.....

Self checkout of library items

Self-checkout for library patrons of borrowed items is a reoccurring item.  Is it time for the library to allow patron self-checkout?  How trusting do we want to become since self-checkout would allow the patron to desensitize items, potentially bypassing our anti-theft systems.  Based on system cost, what's it worth to us?

http://www.demco.com/goto?BLK100882&ALL0000

Getting Started

Whether the learning curve is forced upon us by job requirements or self initiated by curiosity, learning new technology has become a way of life for most of us.  Or we can slough it off at the risk of becoming hopelessly antiquated.  This blog is an attempt on my part to learn the medium and, hopefully, do something productive with it.  Follow along as I learn.