I’m not a librarian — yet. I am a librarian in progress as I’ve just finished up my first year of my MLIS degree at Wayne State University where recently we’ve gone from being a “LISP” to a “SLIS.” I feel like with that move, we should lobby for an entry at Stuff White People Like. Not only am I doing the straight MLIS degree, but I’m doing dual certification in archives AND information management. What does this mean? Longer in school, more student loans² (on top of my existing loans from my BA and MA), with the sliver of a chance of getting better jobs when I graduate next year sometime. My concentration, self-designed more or less, is digital archives and libraries, with a very heavy emphasis on emerging tech.

The story of how I fell into librarianship is long and winded, and I know this as I’ve written it 1093813 times for SOP’s for grad school applications, scholarship essays and spoken of it many a time when queried by people. So I won’t bore you with that, but what is relevant is that I come from a very heavy tech background and for some reason, this makes me special.

Back in the ye olden days of the internets, aka late ’90s and early ’00s, I worked for a variety of firms in a variety of capacities with my last big girl job as a senior network engineer for a tier 1 ISP. In fact, I worked for one of the world’s largest ISP who owned or managed about 70% of the bandwidth that exists on the Internet. That company was UU.Net and has been absorbed by so many goliath corporations that I believe the official entity no longer exists and exists now in name only for branding purposes, but I could be wrong. What I did at UU was playing around on large scale routers, doing turnups for business customers for as small circuits as 56k up to OC3. GigE was just getting into play when I left and I also had big crush on BGP.

And I’ve been a geek, for many many years — long before these web2.0 hussies came in with their Macbooks, “web design skillz” and pink cell phones. There is a heavy distinction, I think, within the geek community and this has become a pet peeve of mine with these web2.0 hussies out touting themselves as “geeks” and OMG, LULZ, aren’t I just adorable line of crap. Right, I’m ranting, not the point.

So! Lisa is now in library school and behold! Look at all of the awesome things libraries are doing and holy cow, some of them are on the bleeding freakin’ edge! So clearly, while I’ve made many a stupid decision in my life, clearly going to library school is not one of them.

Except, except.. the school in which our vaguely young heroine is going to is technologically challenged! Not stone age abacus challenged, but still technically challenged just the same.

There are a couple of problems with this:
1. I’ve found that in the library world, there are two typs of MLIS schools: practical and theory. The practical school is like mine in which you go in, do the work get your degree and move on. The theory schools are the ones that tend to do some of the practical work but also do research, so a lot of the cool stuff starts coming out of the theory school. Some have even gone away from traditional librarianship roles and have become information specialists. Bottom line: There seems to be very few schools who do a combination of both, and mine is starting to come to that methodology but it is not fully realized yet.
2. One of my professors is fond of saying that librarians were last on the tech wagon when in fact we should have been the damned conductors. So the field is now struggling with information overload as we start to grasp the realities of what we missed out on. But on the flipside, there is amazing amount of stuff being done by librarians so we’re definitely making up for lost time.
3. A lot of the practical schools, mine in particular, are not equipped to handle tech-centric students (like myself) who could teach most if not all of the tech courses. Not everyone wants to be a school media specialist nor a public librarian! Stop trying to pigeonhole me into those roles!
4. A lot of students are not aware or being made aware of the limitless possibilities of librarianship and all the cool things going out there. I personally get warm fuzzies just thinking about it. I’ve been on some mailing lists where people are begging about new blogs, wikis, and the like to read of other like-minded individuals only to never be answered with where to go,who to prod or the like. I glom myself to anyone who answers me or speaks to me on this stuff because they are just one more chain in my network I can explore.
5. The librarian v. tech geeks pissing contest needs to stop. This is not freakin’ Tekken! It’s not a matter of to the death of one or the other — there is a lot of similar background, common interests and future plans between the two that there could be a lot of harmonious, sweet lovin’ action going on and no, there isn’t. There needs to be a bridge, other peeps like me, that can talk to both groups and help develop a common language.
6. Google is not an evil rat bastard. ‘Nuff said. I get so bloody tired of hearing that argument.

I could go on, but this may end up as a novella and I think you get the point.
The solution: I think that’s what this blog will be for me, a solution to work out how to do what I want to do with the tools that I have available at my stead. I’ve got a lot of really cool projects coming up with variety of up and coming technologies for class, personal and professional work. And the people writing here are amazing, I’m terribly excited to be here.

1. I am actually a Canadian-American or American-Canadian! I have dual citizenship.
2. I’m a newly minted grad assistant, so the university is now paying for my tuition. But I will be dodging the student loan dude, I’m sure, when I graduate. Or maybe I’ll go for my PhD?

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It’s exciting to have a job title that reflects what I’m already doing anyway, but it’s also kind of intimidating. I mean, keeping up with the trends was something I did as a bonus. Suddenly it’s in my job title.

So I was thinking about what trends I’m currently tracking, and I wonder how they fit into the whole “emerging” thing.

Second Life/Virtual Worlds. I’ve been on this one for a while, but I still think it’s emerging. Mostly because I think no one’s popularized the one true way to use virtual worlds in teaching and learning yet. In fact, there are so many wrong ways in practice currently that many people are getting turned off using Second Life in teaching. I’m still interested in it. I’m a builder, I’m interested in what you could use the environment for to build things and have students build things. A giant collaborative place filled with student-created expression of course content would be awesome. So I’m holding on to this one.

Twitter. I can’t believe I’m putting it on the list, but I am. Mostly because I’ve been talking about how great it is at a conference for some time now and I’m starting to see the argument come back to me from much larger places. People complain about what people twitter during events (”Too critical! Too snarky! The audience is the new keynote!”), but that’s pretty much exactly what would make things interesting in a classroom. I want to install the open source version and try it out with a willing instructor. I’m also interested in it for easy website updates, but most people would tell me that that’s a total misuse of the application. (Too bad!)

Ubiquitous Computing. I’ll say that instead of mobile devices. The hardware will come and go, but the concept of ubiquity for computing is fascinating. It’s coming in fits and starts; I want to see how I can push this one in small ways in the library. Computing without the computer. Ideally without a cell phone either. This is something I’m going to track for a good long while. I have this ubiquitous future in my head that seems like a perfect setting for a cyberpunk novel. (I might get around to writing it one of these days.)

Cheap Storage. As a rule hardware isn’t my area, but I’m interested to see what it means that storage capacity is getting so crazily cheap. If I can carry 120 gb in my pocket without even noticing it, what does that mean for computing in general?

Cloud Computing. This goes along with the cheap storage. Jeremy tells me we will never be affected by the cloud because we are a locked down environment for the most part, but I think he might be wrong. Even if we can’t fully employ the cloud because of security and legal limitations, I think the concept of cloud computing will sink into the consciousnesses of our users. We will need to be prepared to offer services as easily as the cloud can.

Netbooks. This fits in with cloud computing and cheap storage; if we can have tiny little computers with us at all times, massive amounts of physical storage and powerful applications coming down from the cloud, what does the world end up looking like?

Social Networks. Embracing the networks you have, on facebook, on IRC, on Twitter, on IM, wherever. Accepting that we are no longer a culture that uses its brain for information storage; we are processors, connectors. We store our knowledge in machines and in our networks. While social software may look like too much fun to be productive, those social networks are what’s going to scaffold us through most of the rest of our lives. Learning how to respectfully and usefully employ our networks as part of our learning (and teaching, for that matter) is an important skill.

There are some other pieces that are just never going to go away: blogging (for librarians!), wikis for everyone, IM: I think we’ve finally reached a point where we can intelligently choose the best tool for the task at hand from an incredible range of options. So I think part of the emerging trend is to use what’s best, not necessarily what’s most powerful, most expensive, or most popular. Things like twitter and netbooks are evidence of that: sometimes you don’t need all the bells and whistles.

So that’s my emerging update of the moment.

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