LISNews: Librarian Blog Since 1999

On the heels of last night’s post, I saw this older article come across Twitter entitled “100 Things You Should Know About People: #8 — Dopamine Makes You Addicted To Seeking Information”. Apparently, it would appear that librarians are not simply the kind, educated information philanthropists that society and culture has caricatured us. No, we are users and pushers for the dopamine system.

[…] the latest research shows that dopamine causes seeking behavior. Dopamine causes us to want, desire, seek out, and search. It increases our general level of arousal and our goal-directed behavior. (From an evolutionary stand-point this is critical. The dopamine seeking system keeps us motivated to move through our world, learn, and survive). It’s not just about physical needs such as food, or sex, but also about abstract concepts. Dopamine makes us curious about ideas and fuels our searching for information. The latest research shows that it is the opoid system (separate from dopamine) that makes us feel pleasure.
-- Read More

Some of the commenters to Wayne Bivens-Tatum’s post “Nothing is the Future” seem to be under the odd impression that his post is an response to Library 2.0/101. It could be one till you get to the last paragraph of his post.

I've used "mobile" just as one example. The same could be said of various service or organization models. You can plug in any term you want, and know that when anyone tells you that thing is "the future," they're wrong. And to be clear, my criticism isn't of any particular services or trends. If there's a new, popular way for librarians to communicate with or reach out to library users, by all means librarians should adopt it, or at least experiment with it. My criticism is the hype and the reductionism, and the implied claim that some librarians really know what the future holds, and that it just happens to be centered around whatever they happen to like at the moment. Maybe they're convincing themselves, but they're not convincing me.

(Emphasis mine.)
-- Read More

The aim of the International Symposium on Emerging Trends and Technologies in Libraries and Information Services (ETTLIS-2010) is, once again, to bring researchers, academicians, business community and research scholars on a common platform to share their experiences, innovative ideas and research findings about the aspects of emerging trends and technologies in the field of knowledge resource centres and information services.

Access blog at: ETTLIS 2010 http://ettlis2010.ning.com/profiles/blog/list

As the Christmas shopping season officially began over the Thanksgiving holiday, I have been thinking about what the next big thing will be for librarians and libraries in the near future. It’s possibly the right time of year for this type of meditation as business put out their latest and greatest wares for the seasonal marketplace buying frenzy. What is the “must have” item for libraries in this coming year? Is it mobile platforms? Open source programs? Google Wave servers? Lendable e-reader devices? While these certainly have their appeal to the technophile in me, I think the answer is more basic than these contemporary offerings. Like the holidays of this season, I believe that the next big thing in the coming year is a focus on people. Ourselves, our staff, and the communities that we serve: it is a matter of advocacy.
-- Read More