Laura Crossett has a thought provoking blog post, women and altruism: prelimlinary thoughts, with some reactions to Roy Tenant’s recent Library Journal article on the gender imbalance in areas of library technology and conferences. She asks “Do we really believe that women are more civilized than men?” I added my thoughts as a comment on this post. This topic fascinates me.
Angel has a different perspective on IM in his post On IM and Libraries, some musings. He writes “This also leads me to believe that use of IM as a form of virtual reference by the library may not succeed, at least not anytime soon and not as long as IM is not something on the student’s radar.” This post caught my eye because we do not use IM at the library where I work because the students just don’t seem interested. They are interested in IM and conduct most of their conversations via IM – just not with the library staff.
Ross Day discusses the depth of Library 2.0 in a post, Scaling Library 2.0 over at library of primitive art. While talking about this third dimension of Library 2.0, he writes “In the end, it’s not so much a question of scaling down what Library 2.0 has to offer in deference to your narrow audience, yet taking advantage of Library 2.0 to discover and address an untapped and potentially much larger audience with the same economies of scale.” This is an important observation about Library 2.0 and really exemplifies why libraries need to think hard about their customer base and how it now goes beyond the walls of our physical spaces.
Posted by Jennifer 