“let’s buy a computer program that will do everything our library needs to do, only it will do none of it well. we’ll call it an integrated library system.”

i for real LOLed.

but one more thing about the ageism (and i appreciate you having this conversation with me). i agree that it isn’t deliberate. in fact, i think it is a bit institutional…built-in to the way we do things. this might be more dangerous than if it were deliberate age based discrimination. The phrase you use, “fear of youth” might just put a finer point on it.

you too have a good holiday and we’ll catch up after.

our next-gen crazy systems are going to keep track of walk-up reference desk stats and website hits and also handle reference (but not circ) questions via chat, e-mail, IM, text messaging, VoIP, and it seems like the library community is really building up steam on the whole “second life” thing, too.

crazy systems are endemic to our professional culture.

let’s buy a computer program that will do everything our library needs to do, only it will do none of it well. we’ll call it an integrated library system.

here’s another idea, let’s divide all knowledge into 10 neat little categories, then divide each of those into 10 neat little categories and so on and on and on until we have classified everything! i swear, it works.

also, wouldn’t it be easier to look things up in carde catalogues if every librarian had the same handwriting?

i’ll agree youth services is important on every front, and especially that we consider kids and teens as people with legitimate information needs (including homework help and finding lyrics and game cheat codes) and not merely as a group of “future voters and parents” we don’t want to lose touch with.

from where i sit, the benefit to the crazy system is that it lets us collaborate, allowing statewide services take on 20 to 100,000 questions a year (i think i know how you feel about that). but the software isn’t what makes us collaborate.

we collaborate because it provides a forum for discussing best practices, patron privacy and how to talk to kids online – discussions I fear that many IM proponents are not having. collaboration gives us a means to build on some whys (and what-ifs) to our measly little hows and whats.

anyway, i don’t see ageism. there’s a fear of the newfangled and a fear of youth, and a terribly long process and complicated system for doing anything at all, but no deliberate attempts to discriminate.

thanks – i’m doing my best to infiltrate the crazy systems. sorry for windiness. have a good holiday.

I also agree that libraries sometimes have an easier time getting sold a bill of goods from library vendors than making decisions for themselves, but I still think that ageism has something to do with it. They trust “medium-sized, established, slow-moving organizations” run by their peers rather than the obvious preferences of young people. Another way to get at the issue is this: if the first thing that libraries ever heard about IM was that people were using it at work to talk to each other (just like email), would libraries have felt the need to buy big VR products? I’m guessing that it would have been seen as a legit activity.

Thank goodness young people weren’t the pioneers of email! Libraries might be using crazy systems to hook into “those email networks kids are using!”

Regarding public access internet policy I think you could be on to something. I’ve met those sad teenagers who wait for their moms in near-empty libraries, not using the computers because it won’t let them do anything interesting.

As far as software goes, libraries trust medium-sized, established, slow-moving organizations more than we trust huge, sometimes agile (sometimes not) media conglomerates with no history of service to libraries. That’s not ageism so much as risk-aversion.

It sounds like you’re saying it’s time we trust our patrons, and I’m with ya. What’s riskier than shunning our patrons?

Besides that, I feel like the conversation about IM in libraries, both on the staff and public sides, has been taking place largely in blogs and in for-profit trade magazines and conferences.

Meanwhile, ALA, regional library conferences and library schools have held another conversation about “virtual reference” in their own conferences, e-mail discussion lists and magazines, hardly ever mentioning IM.

Change is trickling in slowly – I’m glad to see you and the other blog people continue to be invited to speak all over. I’ll see what I can do from this end.