In the 13 years I have lived in North Carolina I have done customer service and reference training in two different library systems. One of the main points I emphasized to staff I have trained is that public libraries are not without competition. The growth of the big bookstores and the Internet were the primary sources of that competition in the past. Bookstores and the Internet are still part of the challenges faced by public libraries, except the Internet has morphed into a collaborative venture for the most part. If public libraries take the luddite point of view and resist technical changes they are eventually doomed to go the way of the dinosaurs.
I have spent most of the last fifty years working libraries. When I started in 1955, Al Gore was seven years old and was a long way from inventing the Internet. Everything was done manually and libraries had little competition. By the time I went to library school in the mid-1970s computers were being used in universities for statistical research and personal computing was just over the horizon. In the mid-1980s the system I worked for purchased PCs for managers and internal email changed our lives forever. A few years later I retired and the Internet was just taking off. Over the past few weeks I, and my colleagues, have been introduced to blogging, Flickr, Goodreads, del.icio.us, Library 2.0, Google Docs, Google Reader, Podcasts, etc. The 23 Things we have spent this time studying are tools that librarians in the present and the near future can use to bring new users to public libraries and point their way to the resources libraries can provide their communities.
