Lee Rainie, Pew Internet & American Life
Younger users of the internet (millenials- 1982-2000)
Keynote 3/24/06
Who’s blogging this? – talked about blogger feedback to previous talks, and real time backchannel comms (btw he looks exactly as I expected ;) )
Time, “Are kids too wired for their own good?” (Cover Story)
Reality 1
Distinct age group based on many measures of generational behavior
Bigger and most diverse generation in history (Neil Howe and William Strauss. Millenials Rising (Vintage 2000))
- Special
- Sheltered (netnanny, helmets, etc)
- Confident
- Team-oriented (class projects to dates)
- Achieving
- Pressured (helicopter parents: Monday’s WSJ, recruiters from major corporations are finding that parents are accompanying kids to job interviews!?!)
- Conventional
- Tech-embracing (expectations on gathering, working with, sharing info)
Reality 2
Millenials are immersed in media
- Have broadband somewhere
- Have lots of technology at home (KFF study with updates from their work on internet)
- Home media ecology from Tom Wolzien, Sanford C Bernstein & Co.
Product > Route to Home > Display > Local Storage
- Don’t frame the question as which is the preferred channel; rather they will use whatever is most convenient (so multiple channels at the same time – they love the one they’re with)
Reality 3
Technology is mobile
- Smart mobs, sharing information quickly and without top down direction (see Howard Rheingold)
- Communication from any where at any time
Reality 4
Internet plays a special role in their world
- Not more intense users, but they have different uses of the internet, a different profile
- (he says equally using e-mail, but I’d heard that they totally stopped using e-mail unless talking to parents and only IM and text, hmm)
- 33% of teens share their own creations online – they remix, create, capture and share
- 32% have created or worked on webpages for others
- 22% keep their own personal webpage (see MySpace)
- 19% have online journals or blogs (twice the rate of adults)
- 19% remix content they find online
- Steve Bartman (cubs series dude who messed with a foul ball) - w/in 2 hours both work and home contact information given out online worldwide (see photoshop section of Fark
- Remix culture – voting, reputation, critiquing
- Start research projects by browsing, ping colleagues for feedback, self-directed research (don’t push new stuff to them, be available as tech support if you want to be successful)
Reality 5
Multitaskers
- Continuous partial attention – ongoing scanning to find things to focus on (from Stone)
- Always on, on alert, connected
Reality 6
Often unaware of ?
- Don’t care about copyright or property
- Talk about media literacy
- Don’t care about privacy, digital footprints
- Soft surveillance of environment – checking up on other people using the internet
Reality 7
Their technology world will radically change in the next decade
- Not in Rodgers-like S curves of adoption, rather J-curves a la
- Long tail (not started by Chris Anderson! How about Bradford, Zipf, Pareto…) but you do have better access to find out about the long tale through recommender systems, search, browsing
- More mobility of technology (network of things, not people), more citizen tools, better search
Reality 8
The way they approach learning and research tasks will be shaped by their new techno-world
- More self-directed
- Better able to keep up with new developments (alerts and scanning)
- Tied to group knowledge
- More open to interdisciplinary information
- Tagged taxonomies
- People being their own nodes of production
Target rich environment for things to study.
Supporting the World with Digital Gadgets
Hope N. Tillman,
Before the tour
- Interoperability and upgradeability
- Are the tools good for knowledge sharing
- Tipping point (perceived critical mass)
Trends
- Convergence (single devices that do many things)
- Personalization and customization
ZDNet’s Top 10 Gadget Must haves (updated ~every 2 weeks) – don’t necessarily lean too heavily on this, but use it as an overall guide to what’s hot, what’s coming and going
PDA/Handhelds/Tablets
- Convergence
- Functionality vs size
Smart Watches
- Embedded GPS watches for children
- Wireless
- Computing (linux watchpad)
Smart Phones -- Phone – sms – browser – organizer (no ebooks on most of them so far)
MP3 Players – courseware, podcasting (more than just iPods)
Digital voice recorders – separate or built into device
Video players/recorders – vlogging, videocasting
Digital cameras
Pocket scanners – reading pens, scan store send, translation, reads aloud, dictionaries
Digital pen – take notes by hand on a special type of paper, like a tablet pc but cheaper, lighter, smaller – 40 pages at a time (who will take this up? Old timers used to handwriting notes?)
Security everywhere – RFID, biometrics like fingerprint recognition
Special purpose chips – like debit cards, jump drives, IBM soulpad (operating system)
Wireless
Remote controls (universal)
Game machines (she provides some good cites and places to find more info)
GPS – geocaching, pc-based, smart phones
What toys do your toys have (like build a bear) -- Solar powered backpack, Protective covers, Cases
Library applications
- Marketing (like blogging, MySpaces)
- Operations (like inventory control, circ)
- Communication/Collaboration
- Learning/entertainment (ebooks, search engines, databases for portable devices, e-audiobooks
What’s Next
- E-ink/e-paper (Sony Librie), e-paper, keyboards with wall display
- Soft hardware (like fabric keyboard)
- Wearable computing (see my notes from Pattie Mayes from ASIS&T)
- Games and embedded librarians (reference librarian avatars to provide cheat sheets, hints, faqs)
The Future of Catalogs
Roy Tenant,
What catalogs do well (not ILS so not talking about circ functions or acquisitions functions)
- inventory control (what you have where it is)
- known item searching, within a particular system
The short list of what they don’t do well
- anything searches besides known item
- locating anything beyond books and journal titles (not journal articles)
- displaying results in logical groupings, display complexity as needed
- no faceted browsing (mostly)
- no relevance ranking
- no recommender services
How we got into this mess? Magically?
- began in circulation and technical services
- public access was an afterthought
- systems were optimized for librarians, not users (sounds familiar)
- we don’t use what we know about our materials (finally OCLC is working on this, see post from yesterday’s session)
Key problems
- conflated managing content, inventory control and discovery
- stovepipe systems (systems don’t play well with others)
- abdicated all responsibility to vendors
- we’ve been slow to exploit new opportunities
- we collaborate on sharing materials but not on building systems and coding (starting to change, hopefully)
Assertions
- catalog is one finding tool among many (isn’t this part of the problem, though? That users don’t know when the library catalog is appropriate?)
- users need to know more about what they can get if they can wait a little bit via
- users need to find more information of different types
- we can do better
Catalogs must
- interoperate
- function well as a standalone, part of a unified finding tool
- refocused on local inventory only
Good things happening:
- Reports:
- Demo.gapines.org (open source library system to go live in the fall)
- RedLightGreen
- Curiouser, fiction finder from OCLC (see yesterday’s notes)
- library.csusm.edu/search/books – x9 books using xlibris metalib to find books
Catalogs for the Future
Andrew Pace, NCSU
“library automation: yesterday’s technology tomorrow”
“ILS vendors squandering our money and doing exactly what we ask them to do”
{out of battery no more notes}
{after the session in the press room}
Some great comments here. If I can only remember them! Oh yeah – you know how libraries are all bent around the axel about FRBR? NCSU asked Endeca and gave a long explanation of what they meant – Endeca said, oh yeah, product rollup, that’s easy. They do this all the time like for a clothing store where they’ll put the purple shirts with the pink of the same cut.
