Sunday, September 25, 2005

Scan Season

To quote the ever-quotable Willie Nelson, I'm on the road again.

Thursday, we had a WebJunction Advisory Committee meeting at the archives of the State Library in Hartford, Connecticut. Part of the meeting was an abbreviated version of my scan presentation. Jim Welbourne, the director of the New Haven Free Public Library, related a very interesting point when we were discussing the concept of self-service. He said that the most frequent type of information sought at their unstaffed kiosk libraries is health information. Despite a consumer health information center in their main library, some people would rather seek information about health questions anonymously.

Friday, Joan Frye Williams and I did a presentation called "The Future of Libraries" at the San Francisco Public Library. We did a tag team presentation, throwing the lead back and forth as we covered the scan and many of Joan's intriguing ideas on the future of public services in libraries. Susan Hildreth, California's State Librarian, followed us, discussing what the State Library is doing in various areas to help build capacity in the libraries there. After lunch, the audience broke into three smaller groups. Joan, Susan and I moved among the groups for three separate but equally lively question and answer sessions. And I hate to tell you, Alane, but the digital divide was one of the hot topics in these small groups! We're repeating this presentation on November 16 in the Los Angeles area.

I'll also be doing scan presentation in October in Columbus (Ohio Library Council); Mesa, Arizona (Arizona Library Association); Williamsburg, Virginia (Virginia Library Association); and Hartford, Connecticut (Connecticut Library Consortium). If you happen to attend any of these events, stop by and say hello!

3 comments:

George said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
George said...

The original deleted comment was a spam response. I hate those bottom-feeding cretins.

The second one had a spelling error that I didn't notice until I published.

Anonymous said...

Well, too bad the Scan has absolutely nothing to say about the digital divide. In fact, it uses a series of graphs that would give Edward Tufte apoplectic fits to make it look like anything the Scan has to say might hold water outside of the US and Europe. Yikes! I hope librarians are slightly more statistically literate than the Scan gives them credit for. The digital divide is so 1990s. It's a new century, and the poor can eat each other.