Career Space E-zine

Patron’s in the Driver’s Seat: Give Advanced Tool-Sets to Library Patrons by John Blyberg, Ann Arbor District Library: a lecture for the HigherEdBlogCon 2006 Conference. I’m intrigued by a number of concepts within this lecture. As a library staff member for the past 10 years at UBC I’ve seen the growth and hiccups resulted from moving from one library online system to another. Currently we have started some initiatives that will involve defining what the library website could be and how the role of the librarian fits in with that of being the “information broker”.

Two issues were raised that caught my eye. Some functionality to be considered in the future perhaps? The first being the “virtual card catalogue”. As our library is a biomedical research library, the ability for the patron to create their own inventory of previous resources used as well as items of interest would be of great benefit and most definitely has been on the wish list of many a researcher. Moreover, to create lists that are viewable to the public has a lot of functionality about it. We have seen this in the social bookmarking site del.icio.us. An instructor would be able to refer his students and/or colleagues to the URI in order to see what resources s/he has been looking at.

The second item is the future ability of the user/patron to supply their own content to add to the library collection. As John Blyberg mentioned this could include historical photographs and possibly to other media. This content could include podcasts of conferences, political speeches to name just a few. Recently I was at the Northern Voice 2006 blogging conference. The podcasting and subsequent posting on blogs would allow those not able to attend to listen to the lectures and it may also act as a reference to those doing research, for example, on the cultural implications of blogging.

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