The ever popular Beloit College Mindset List for the Class of 2013 has been published, once again making me feel old and young at the same time. Several items on the list pertain specifically to libraries:
4. They have never used a card catalog to find a book.
This is excellent! Despite the many deficiencies of our current OPACs (and the deficiency of the acronym OPAC), our online catalogs are infinitely superior to their paper predecessors. We have spent a lot of time in our library trying to our OPAC, and we will soon be directing our users to Worldcat Local instead of our own catalog because Worldcat Local has a much better search interface.
14. Text has always been hyper.
For our incoming freshman, born in 1991, the internet has pretty much always existed. They didn’t have an A ha! moment when discovering Amazon.com for the first time, thinking about how it changed book buying. These students have probably always assumed that information could be found online, and the idea of a CD-ROM encyclopedia is probably pretty funny.
34. They have always been able to read books on an electronic screen.
Although eBook readers have taken off in recent years, especially with the introduction of the Kindle, the ability to read a book on a computer screen has been around for ages. Recent developments in book standards from SONY and other eBook manufacturers, Barnes and Nobles release of an eBook store without a stand alone reader, and many other recent developments in the eBook market make this a time of quick change in how books are accessed and read.
72. Migration of once independent media like radio, TV, videos and compact discs to the computer has never amazed them.
I think that students will have less tolerance for the way that different types of information are segregated. We have traditionally segregated books, articles, reference materials etc. physically and online by telling our users to use different search tools to find different materials. Why? How often does it really matter? Certainly some assignments ask students to find X number of articles, books etc., but often they just need appropriate information. Shouldn’t we be able to search across all kinds of material and make decisions about appropriateness of the format once we find it?
Read the list – it will make you feel old as you think “I remember that!” and you may feel young if you look at items and think “Hmm, I didn’t know that existed.”
the Undergraduate Science Librarian 