Presentation for 2010 Joint Meeting of the Medical Library Group of Southern California & Arizona (MLGSCA) and the Northern California and Nevada Medical Library Group (NCNMLG)
10. â Todayâs patrons expect information in the palm of their handâŠcell phones are their primary interfaceâ â Social Networking Literacy Competencies for Librariansâ Iâm pretty sure Iâm a lot like Joe I think Joe mistakes his own interests for broadly-adopted trends
27. â I hate PubMed. I hate it with a burning passion. For a site that is as vital to scientific progress as PubMed is, their search engine is shamefully bad. Itâs embarrassingly, frustratingly, painfully bad.â -Anna Kushnir, Harvard PhD Candidate
43. â Bundling songs into long-playing albums lowered the production, marketing, and distribution costs because there were fewer records to make, ship, shelve, categorize, alphabetize, and inventory. As soon as music went digital, we learned that the natural unit of music is the track.â
Zippo, the dinosaur librarian from Dinotopia. â Librosaursâ Reactionaries. Reject-o-matics. â Urban Amishâ @Paul Camp and @Amy Chatfield who are presenting their paper, "No Urban Amish Here" Â â Urban amish are city dwellers with no cell phone, no laptop, no iPod, no Blackberry, etcâ Librarian + Luddite = Libdite. (Ludbrarian is also acceptable.) "People in distress will sometimes prefer a problem that is familiar to a solution that is not." - Neil Postman (March 8, 1931 - October 5, 2003)
âOur own uses of technologyâ The more I read technology gurus, the more I am convinced that oneâs personal experience
Mel Rothman c. 1974 (b. 1943, so in this photo heâs about the same age I am now) IBM Programmer
IBM 5496 Keypunch machine.
System/3's Multi-Function Card Unit (MFCU) MFCU. They just donât make acronyms like they used to. âMFCUâ Sounds like something from a 70s blaxploitation film, doesnât it? In 1974, about 25 miles away here, my father used this sophisticated IBM technology to make a whole bunch of these:
I didnât stand a chance at a normal life. This is the point at which, I believe, it was determined I would probably ever have a tan or a favorite football team. Worse, I just recently realized that I have passed this obviously congenital condition of nerdism on to my son, Simon.
âŠthe IBM 3340 Direct Access Storage Facility was introduced in March 1973 âŠTwo, three or four 3340 drives could be attached to the IBM System/370 Model 115 processor -- which had been announced concurrently with the 3340 -- providing a storage capacity of up to 280 million bytes.
Neither image of the flash drive are to scale
To match the hard drive on my laptop
THIS, I think, hits pretty close to why I get so excited about information technology
That includes, by the way, more than 20,000 audiobooks.
âŠand so do you. Weâre so spoiled
According the NLMâs Janet Zipser, MEDLINE was the first remote access, real-time database in existence. By the end of 1972 about 150 libraries had access to MEDLINEŸ all at medical schools and research facilities . The rate was $6/hour , a 4-fold reduction over direct dial. The highest speed available was 30 characters/second. Most people had 10 characters/second Texas Instrument Silent 700s.
Want a âremote access, real-time databaseâ? Okay. Theyâre cheap and easy to make. Every WordPress blog youâve ever seen (including this one from Marie Kennedy or The Krafty Librarian or davidrothman.net) has a mySQL database back-end. Remote-access, real-time databases are so common now that you donât think twice about it when you use them.
PubMed is of course now easy to use and free to anyone with internet access and is a spectacularly good use of my tax dollars.
Not all futures are sunny
SKYNET is scary. It is a massive computer network that gained sentience and rebelled against its human creators at a corporation called âCyberDyne Systemsâ. Thank goodness that there is no massive, powerful, wealthy, super-computing entity that seeks a kind of hegemony through ordering the worldâs information, right?
Wonât go away, but should continue to be used LESS as the cost of paper is (as it should be) transferred to the patron. We should deal in information, not containers.
Publishers need to learn the lessons that Napster and iTunes taught the music industry- and learn âem quick. DRM ebooks will eventually go the way of DRM music.
Technological change has happened, is happening and will continue to happen quickly. Some users will keep up, but most will not- and thatâs the key to the lasting usefulness of a clinical information professional in a hospital library: The hospital librarian DOES keep up. Rather than seeing technology as a THREAT, it should be seen as they KEY to job security.