Data Obsessed

It’s been an extra-long time since I posted here.  Mostly work has remained the way it’s been all year for me - extremely busy - and it doesn’t leave me much time or energy for blogging.   Plus, there just hasn’t been as much out in the liblogs that I’ve felt compelled to comment on.  But on to the point:

Last night was the Hudson Valley SLA’s April meeting, at David Chen’s Chinese restaurant in Armonk, New York, and our guest and speaker was the national president-elect, Stephen Abram.  Stephen’s a 2.0 evangelist, and I’ve made it obvious over the past couple of years that I’m not.  I admit that I had some personal reservations initially - not that he wouldn’t be an excellent presenter, because I knew that - but that the presentation would dredge up the old, beaten-into-the-ground argument between those who think Library 2.0 is a paradigm shift in librarianship and those who think that 2.0 tech gives us new ways to accomplish what we’ve always been trying to do.

It didn’t at all, but the presentation did make me feel my age more than usual.  If we want to talk in generational terms, I was the sole “Millennial” librarian in a room full of Boomers.  When I skimmed Stephen’s diagrams of all the Web 2.0 tools out there, I’d heard of a lot of them, and I’d tried out a lot of the ones I’d heard of.  I didn’t get the feeling from my neighbors that that was the case with a lot of them, and frankly, I can’t blame them.  I’ve tried out most of those tools because I started trying them out in graduate school.  If Web 2.0 had exploded when I was already entrenched in a career, I don’t know when I would have found the time.  I think I would have been overwhelmed.

One of the key things Stephen mentioned (I think this was during the question period) was that if you set aside fifteen minutes a day, you can learn and keep up with these technologies.  I was skeptical at the time - I have no idea how many minutes a day I spend on Web 2.0, but I guarantee that I probably spend more than fifteen minutes a day reading liblog feeds alone - but then I saw Meredith’s very timely post today, and they’re both right; it can be done.  The trick is in limiting yourself.  I have 52 blogs in my newsgator account filed under Libraries/Information/Knowledge.  If you’ve only got fifteen minutes, don’t do that.  Pick five or six, and as Meredith says, make them very focused on your interests.  And after you’ve done that, play.  Set up a del.icio.us account.  Try out Google Docs.  Heck, if you have more discipline than me, you can even try to catalog your entire home book collection with LibraryThing.

But I think the real key point that sometimes gets lost in the This Is The Future And We Have To Keep On Top Of It is…this is supposed to be fun.  Don’t stick with a tool if playing with it bores you to tears or if you can’t see yourself ever using it.  I have Flickr account I usually forget about.  But Writely/Google Docs? For me, one of the most awesome things ever.  There’s enough toys out there for everyone to be able to find something for them.  The trick is playing around long enough to find it.

Filed under: Librarianship, Technology
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