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okay, so i just got back from vancouver where the lovely carla graebner invited me to present a session on competitive intelligence in libraries - it was a blast…and so if you quickly refer to the 2nd edition of the Guide to Standard Male Fantasies, after the one where the hot female doctor asks you to cough again but before the one where the hot female cop tells you there’s a way out of the speeding ticket, there’s this one where the librarian takes off the glasses and lets her hair down and turns into the chick from van halen’s ‘hot for teacher’ - it was like that…

…hmmm, so vancouver, beautiful city, the most diverse group of white and asian people i’ve met in years…a lotta money there, blenz coffee rules, great sushi, nice views…

as for the library industry, because lets think of it like an industry for a moment, it seems that there was this ‘industry in potential decline’ theme glazing the edges of the conference cake…while individual sessions were reasonably granular, there was an overall trend toward (many) looking at how to increase the relevance of libraries to patrons…and while i suppose many of the tactical and strategic ideas make incredible sense, from gaming and use of web 2.0 services in libraries to changing programs and services, i felt like there was something huge being overlooked, perhaps best phrased as a simple question:

“why on earth should my 8th grade son get on his bike and ride to the library for any information if he’s got the interweb at home?”

…now if i look at my son (not right now, he’s still asleep), i see something very different from what i felt some librarians are talking about…when discussion of patrons comes up, it seems that ‘patrons‘ means current adults, not the adults-in-10-or-20-years that i’m thinking about…i tried to convey this idea by talking about the changing role of the information forager…

what do i mean by that? well, if my older son (and younger one) are raised in an educational environment that permits internet citations in papers, condones wikipedia as valid and generally doesn’t mention the library as a resource (or brings it up as an afterthought), then we’re collectively looking at a future in which the information forager has been trained to go online and online only to collect and harvest information…so how might a library fit into that information forager’s cycle? i mean, how might the library literally get in the way?

…that’s a tough question, but i think it’s the only question that matters. adults and peeps with kids will always hit the library for myriad reasons, but what i worry about most is whether samuels’ quote becomes a mantra - “a library is thought in cold storage” - and i’m not pretending to have the answer…

some of what i discussed in my session bears relevance, building ‘library branded’ online resources (e.g. the baker school’s amazing online research resources, free, available to all), using open source tools to build such resources, building identities and relationships in public online networks, offering advisory services and so on and so on…but in the end the same issue remains: in 10 or 20 years, kids (and adults) are going to be so used to online research and online reading that it’s going to take a lot more than one-off novelties like gaming or video centers to lure them in…

…until things change, and i mean really change, i do believe that the only real relationship that i (and most people) have with a local library is going to be an email reminder that my return is late…and the opportunity to engage has gotta be bigger than that, right?.

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