Discovery Exercise #15

Rick Anderson's "Away From the 'Icebergs'" was an interesting read for me. I thought that he hit on some relevant issues that libraries will be facing in the future; in fact, we are already feeling the impact of technological change.

First, he says we must do away with a "just in case" collection. To me, this means having a core set of print and electronic databases as a foundation, and then supplement with more resources and materials as budgets and customer usage direct. Having attended Gale's webinar "Is Print Reference Dead?", this is an interesting topic to me. I don't think that we need to get rid of print materials entirely, even if more and more people are embracing the web. Obviously, many of our customers have not, and still prefer tangible items. However, with each generation of tech-savvy kids that comes along, that day is approaching.

Anderson makes an interesting point about user education: sometimes it's more important to decrease the barriers that customers face getting information instead of focusing solely on instruction. I do believe that we should make things as accessible as possible, but I'm not sure that we can totally do away with customer education. Again, it all depends on your customer base and level of comfort with technology. Still, his point that we should focus on "user-centric" service is well taken.

Finally, he suggests that we must be ready to meet the customer where they are, not necessarily expect them to come to the physical library. I think that JPL is already doing this. Many library blogs are appearing to reach out to customers, library accounts can be accessed anywhere online, materials such as Overdrive are being offered to our customers -- we are on the right path.