Chris Peters's blog

As with many questions about the future of technology, I’m afraid that the only completely honest answer to the questions in the title of this post is probably “I don’t know and neither does anyone else”. So pardon me while I make a provisional attempt to answer this unanswerable question.

Chris Anderson's (Wired Magazine’s editor-in-chief and author of The Long Tail) articles are always worth reading, but his latest: “In the Next Industrial Revolution, Atoms Are the New Bits," is especially interesting in its implications for libraries and librarians.

Last week our good friend, astute colleague and soon-to-be-mom Brenda Hough forwarded two articles that made me think about the role that libraries play in their communities during tough economic time.

Thursday of last week I was disappointed when I realized that I had missed  the Tuesday/Wednesday Technology Essentials online conference organized by WebJunction (fortunately, recordings are available), so my good friend and colleague Brenda Hough gave me her invitation to the ALA TechSource’s TechTrends: MidWinter 2010 webinar featuring short presentations by Jason Griffey, Sean Fitzpatrick, Greg Landgraf and Kate Sheehan. Each of these well-informed and observant speakers gave their unique perspective on the technology trends they saw emerging at the ALA MidWinter Conference in Boston.

Teaching, learning and research have always been social activities involving heavy reliance on trust, reputation and brand awareness., and these social aspects of information seeking behavior grow more prevalent every year. This natural tendency to seek reliable, community-validated information sources has traditionally drawn people to libraries for two reasons.

News about an update to Google Reader can’t compete with the buzz surrounding the launch of the iPad, but any feature that helps us mitigate information overload is good news in my opinion, especially if you happen to be a reference librarians or an information junkie. 

If you've been following the economic stimulus bill (The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 or ARRA) and its impact on libraries, you know that it allocates $7.2 billion to encourage investment in America's broadband infrastructure. Of that money, $200 million has been specifically allocated to expand public computing capacity in libaries and community colleges.

I'm a big fan of calculators such as the IT Staff Calculator
that Lori Ayres developed for planning and estimating your IT staff
needs. They're not perfect of course, but they give you a sense of the
big picture and whether your projections line up with the experiences
of other libraries.

The catch is that first preference goes to a small library in the Louisville, KY area. Yep that narrows it down some, but this plea for help from Michelle at the Consuming Louisville blog is something all libraries should look at. She wants to buy books for one of her local libraries, and she reaches lots of people who feel the same way, so she's starting a virtual book drive.