Reading Report #4

"The Infodiet: How Libraries Can Offer an Appetizing Alternative to Google"By: Steven J Bell

This article discusses how students today are becoming more dependent on search engines such as Google and are not taking advantage of the resources libraries. Libraries offer everything from books, journals, magazines to databases, something a lot of people are not that familiar with. This article talks about how students are not able to understand the scholarly information in databases and are not willing to take time and search for the information they need. Students want easy to find information fast. The term coined for this type of information in infobesity. However many people believe that search engines should be easier for students to use because some current interfaces are extremely difficult to understand. For example, their interfaces should appear like search engines such as Google. The end of the article discusses some experiments that have been done and the results show that databases should be more like search engines. They need to get more sophisticated software though so that it produces better and more relevant results.

I think that this article is really important and it discusses many relevant issues. I know many students do not know how to access information at the library and are too lazy to try and figure it out or get help. I know personally I do not take advantage of everything that libraries offer but I am going to start as well as tell others about it and suggest to them that they should go to libraries more as well. I do agree with the article though in that it can be extremely difficult to navigate databases and searching through them can be very time consuming. I know there has to be an easier way to publish them and if they found one I am sure others would use them more. Everything changes eventually so working on something to improve databases should be touched on as well.

Reading Report #3

"The Future of Libraries"by Thomas Frey, Executive Director of the DaVinci Institute

In the article, "The Future of Libraries Beginning the Great Transformation,” it starts by talking about the historical roles of libraries. Libraries were used in the beginning to preserve artwork and important documents. Books in the past were very expensive and only the wealthy could afford to buy them. That is when Gutenberg invented the printing press. This made for a lot of future trends in libraries and the article discusses ten of these trends. The article talks about how ways of creating information are changing. People used to use phonographs and are now using podcasts. Technologies come and go for a reason. An example used in the article was talking about how the 8 track was replaced by the tape and the tape was replaced with a CD and now we have iPod’s and MP3 players. They discussed how even search technology is becoming more complex and human needs are growing. This causes libraries to have to adapt to new changes. The article talks about how consumers are changing their demands and new technology and waves of communications are surfacing. The article ends by giving libraries advice on how to adjust to these changes.

I personally think this is a really interesting and true article. There are so many changes going on in our society right now and people are changing their demands. The things people want are different from what they wanted years ago. Changes are happening often and libraries need to be ready to make these changes as well. I think that libraries really need reevaluate how they can and will make these changes. It is crazy the evolution of libraries. It is amazing to me how a library can go from something that solely achieves materials and is for the wealthy, to being freely available to anyone and everyone.