week 1 readings

OCLC: This article is about the shift from consumers purchasing content with containers, to purchasing content alone. Containers are anything that holds information, such as a book, CD or DVD. Content is the information held in these. Consumers are more and more often purchasing the content alone, such as in e-books, or by paying 99cents for a song from Itunes. Miriam Williams, of the ALA, stated that it may get to the point that information becomes a commodity where nothing is free; she stated that one day we may pay 25 cents for a sentence. Blogs and wikis, which are user edited information forums, are also becoming more popular. These are created and edited by consumers and are usually free to access. Information is becoming a commodity in which almost nothing is free. I found this article to be very interesting; it had a lot to do with how libraries are evolving, and how they will probably be in the future.

Clifford Lynch: This article was written in 1998, but it had a lot to do with how technology is changing, and a lot of what it covered and predicted seems to be true still today. Lynch theorizes that information literacy will be essential, “for people to succeed in all walks of life.” This is certainly true, and will become even more so as time goes by.

Lied Library: This article, in my opinion, was very detailed; it had its interesting points, but a lot of it was very drawn out. I found it interesting that this library had to replace all of its computers within the four years since opening, to stay current in today’s technological world, and since this article was written, the computers may have been replaced again. In the Lied Library, there is a lot of money spent on everything, from staff, computers, security, and even a new air conditioner. This library is at the fore-front of technology, and because of this money must be spent to maintain this technology. I found it interesting that very little mention was made of books or journals available in paper-form. This article was solely about the technological aspects of the library, though being such a large library there must be an equally large book and journal collection.