The Pop Tart

In my job as a librarian, I'm generally considered to be a member of the younger guard. I'm not, though I like to let them think I am and if you've read this blog for any amount of time you know I'm am in spirit if not numbers. Over the last couple of days I attended the WiLSWorld Conference here in Madison and the wow factor was that it made me feel both way old and just young enough to maybe keep up.

The keynote speaker was the very dynamic Stephen Abrams, a Canadian who's big in the library world and has done a little of everything. Yesterday he thrilled me and scared the crap out of me by showing all the things out there we can be doing and the things we're not. His focus was on how on we can meet the user where they're at, rather then waiting for them to come to us (and he thinks the millenial generation won't be coming to us). Many of the web places he mentioned as being key to this group are barely on most librarys' radars - including mine. We know they're there but haven't yet figured out how to make them work for us. Things like My Space, Facebook, Flickr, Delicious, to name a few. And even those are probably going to be obsolete soon. Photobucket is making big inroads on Flickr as a photo site. Who knows what will be next?

I don't and though I'm excited to try and figure it out, man oh man am I feeling old. If you want to check out Stephen Abrams, take a look at his blog. And if that isn't enough, take a look at the other keynote speaker's blog, Lorcan Dempsey and see if you can't come up with a few more things we need to know about.