Susan Waldon

In the last 50 years, technology for delivering information services has changed as much as transportation technology did in the previous century. Laura Ingalls Wilder was born in 1867 and died in 1957. In her lifetime, transportation technology was completely transformed. Her first journeys were via covered wagon, but she had flown in a commercial jet plane before she died (McDonough, 2014). If she had lived for 8 more months, she could have been among those who were awed by the sight of Sputnik ushering in the space age. I expect that information technology will undergo a much bigger transformation in my lifetime than transportation did in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s time. I remember the slide rule that my dad used for work, the radios that he made from Heathkit electronics kits, and our first color television. Now digital devices handle everything that those technologies did and much, much more. In addition to the print information that the librarians of yesteryear organized, we now have all kinds of digital information as well. We have opportunities to help patrons create, as well as consume, information. We have more powerful ways to search and more powerful ways to convey information. Now that we have all these options, it is important to choose the most effective technologies for various information services.

 

This sense of possibility about the ways that the digital revolution could make the world of information better, easier to navigate, and more interesting, permeated my coursework. It has been one of the more challenging aspects of my education because I am a digital non-native who was very busy taking care of small children when much of the digital revolution happened. I continue to play catch-up in some ways. In LIS 620, I got my first taste of the power of a digital platform to curate knowledge and make it easier to create a kind of one-stop shop for information on a given subject. Using the LibGuide application, we were able to include not only books and articles, but also Web pages and videos related to our chosen subject. I was able to create a resource about autism that I felt could be of assistance to families dealing with autism, and it turned out so well that I wished that I could put it out there for the public to see. Due to changes to LibGuides, all that remains of it are the screenshots that I took of it, But I would recreate it happily if my library system could use it. I loved that you could literally put all kinds of information at the patron’s fingertips and do so in such an organized and attractive way.

 

In LIS 635, Media Production for Library Programs, I learned many other ways to present information. To make an infographic about our class composition, I used a free web application to turn some pretty boring statistics into an interesting and visually appealing graphic. I could imagine ways to use this to market the library to our stakeholders and collaborators as well as to help students with assignments. We used a free screen casting web application to convey information to imaginary students for flipped instruction on a subject of our own choosing. This powerful technique has a lot of potential as a method of making tutorials to help patrons navigate all the new ways that they can access library services. We also created a website on a free web hosting site. I made a website curating content related to doing fun and educational story times so that I could learn about creating a website and doing story times at the same time. I intend to make extensive use of it when I am planning my own story times and other programming.

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Information that is not described and organized in some findable way is invisible to the point that it almost might as well not even exist. In LIS 640 and 641, I learned about organizing information for good access in a digital environment. This gets to the heart of librarianship, which has always been concerned with organizing information so that people can find it when they need it. I learned about and created a finding aid. I learned about online public access catalogs and how things are cataloged for digital catalogs using both content and display standards that are changing as the information landscape changes. I also learned that we are a long way from the ideal as far as making our online catalogs easy to use or our resources easy to discover. It will be interesting to see if linked data eventually makes individual library resources appear in search engine results so that people can see when the library has something related to their latest question without searching the library catalog separately or the library databases separately from even the library catalog or the library research guides in yet another place on the library website.

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In my literature classes, LIS 617 Materials for Children and LIS 618 Materials for Adolescents, I used YouTube to turn in video book talks that were made using a smart phone. It was a lesson in content creation that could be used in so many ways both to market library resources and services and to help patrons create their own content for academic and other purposes.

 

In my final semester as a library science student, I took a seminar class in Community Informatics which focused on ways people learn and teach technology. For that class I volunteered with the Raleigh Parks and Recreation Department Digital Literacy Initiative. I saw the power of using a television hooked to whatever device you were demonstrating to help people learn to use different technologies to enhance their daily lives. It was a lesson in effective tech instruction and in knowing more of the technologies my patrons might be using to access library services. The experience has been invaluable to me and I hope to have been of help to many of the students along the way as well. One of the conclusions of this seminar is that nobody knows everything about digital technology and that we are all learning and teaching it as we help people in their quests for information. Another conclusion is that the technology and the digital environment change so rapidly that the best tech for a given information need is often a moving target and it is essential to stay engaged so that you are aware of changes and new opportunities to serve the community.

 

Information technology has come such a long way and made some things so much easier. Laura Ingalls Wilder was forced to fictionalize her accounts of her family’s pioneering days much more than she wanted to simply because she could not recall certain details of her early life. Now many of the details for which she searched in vain by writing letters to historical societies are readily available on the web (Hill, 327). My attitude toward using technology for effective information service needs to be that of a pioneer who looks around to see what is available and uses it to the best of my ability to build what is needed to fill the information needs of my patrons.

 

References:

 

Hill, P.S. (Ed.). (2014).  Laura Ingalls Wilder, pioneer girl: The annotated autobiography. Pierre, SD: South Dakota Historical Society Press. 327.

 

McDonough, Y.Z. (2014). Little author in the big woods: A biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder. New York, NY: Henry Holt and Company. 112, 123.