I think my inability to keep up with the conversation could probably be a personal failing, but more likely reflects the sheer amount of f2f work I am still doing in this digital day and age. Soemthing, somewhere has to give. The truth, of course, is probably somewhere in between.

That being said, thank you to all who read, commented, and then went off and wrote your own prose pieces. I’m glad to have started a conversation.

Really looking forward to a vacation,

LAV

Actually you can have a dance party in a virtual library. I have been to dance parties in our Second Life Library.

While I am one to which code sings, I can emphathize with those who feel technology is being shoved down their throat. At the same time, please don’t yank me by the chain and choke me when I try to delve into it.

Most of my thoughts on it are not direct replies to your content, but more to your experience of the overall feelings of the profession, in particular because they do not match mine and I’m interested in that difference in experience.

I was discussing it with my partner on our drive to dinner before having read the comments. I was saying how I felt that the technology fervor had died down some and that I wondered how much of that was an actual change in the field as a whole and how much of it was a broadening (or maybe narrowing) of my reading and my social circle. I feel in my personal news stream (Facebook, RSS, etc.) I encounter primarily more reasoned, “here is this neat new thing and some of the ways you could use it if you are so inclined” and far less, “oh my God, we must all immediately do X!” Whereas when I was new to the field I felt very much that the latter sentiment is primarily what I encountered and combated (and sometimes admittedly, joined in). I also wonder how much influence there is in the fact that people who are stronger proponents of technology are more likely to use technology to spread their views. Thus the blogs all say X, not because most people think X, but because people who think Y are less likely to blog (or tweet, or friendfeed, or whathaveyou).

Another thought occurs to me – I have thoroughly ensconced myself in academic librarianship, and more specifically community colleges. I wonder how much that is skewing my perception about what librarians believe. Have academic libraries embraced the idea of admitting publicly when their technologies have failed them in a way that hasn’t caught on with public libraries? Or is my head just buried in one corner of the academic world and the prevailing rhetoric is still, ‘jump on the new shiny’ if I would just look up long enough to notice?

I like to call myself a technophile luddite. I’ll admit that physical books don’t call or sing to me the way that hypertext does. But I’m not interested in doing away with books either. I worked at a community college where students primarily rejected my offerings of ebooks and online articles, preferring a physical book they could take home. Sometimes it was because they didn’t have a computer at home, sometimes they just didn’t want to stare at a screen any longer, sometimes they were uncomfortable with the technology, sometimes they had already found most of the information they needed, but still had to fill the teacher’s requirement of x number of print resources. Regardless of their reasons, it pushed me to remain a heel dragger against moving too much of our content online. At the same time, we did a user study and found 96% of our respondents had cell phones and a generally high interest in access to a mobile library website. So overall, I’m interested in providing what my users want as opposed to what an outsider says I need to be doing.

While I don’t always personally turn to paper, I think I hear the same music as you, “singing of ethics, social justice, intellectual freedom, physical artifacts, access to government information” and the importance of people.

Haven’t been back to read the comments, but what you said–not just about librarianship, but about the future, about media, about…