Assignment 1: Week 1 Readings

While reading the OCLC article from 2004, what most struck me was the realization that we are already living in the future therein described. The vague mention of "moblogs" has come to life with sites like Twitter, and print media has indeed entered a steady decline. While I could be persuaded to agree that the central task of libraries might shift from storing information to verifying the provenance and authenticity of information, it remains to be seen how exactly that would be done.
Vaughan, in his article on Leid Library, managed to make an awful lot of simple problems sound more complex than they really are. It's not rocket science to re-use the boxes that your new monitors get shipped in to ship out your old monitors, and it's a no-brainer that you're going to have to kick community users off of your work stations when students need to use them. And while some of his brief history is more helpful, it is of limited practical use to smaller institutions that lack the funds to replace their PCs every three years or purchase ten-ton AC units.
Lynch's brief position paper is, I suppose, most noteworthy for the accuracy of its predictions. In sum, information/tech literacy is becoming ever more essential to ever greater numbers of professionals. But of course, we LIS students already knew that.