ubiquitous access

This morning I was at a Library town meeting where James Hilton, the University's new CTO was speaking. I've heard him speak before at conferences, and I found an excellent article that covers much of what he discussed this morning that I think people should read:

http://0-www.educause.edu.csulib.ctstateu.edu/LibraryDetailPage/666?ID=ERM0623

What struck me this morning was the audience's reaction to much of what he was saying, because so much of it was new to them. Email is old-fashioned? What does DRM stand for? What is "Rip. Mix. Burn."?

The timing was strangely serendipitous. Last Friday, Jim Campbell was telling me that we should do something about developing a better-educated clientele -- not our patrons, but our internal Library clientele. Today we officially started planning a discussion series with our Library training coordinator to introduce our Library staff to information resources they might not know about (but our patrons probably do). It's not principally about new technologies, but about new resources. Exposing Library staff to new technologies tangentially would be a bonus.

Among the topics that have come up -- Library blogs and blogging, Wikipedia and wikis, IMDB, Flickr, Google Scholar and Book Search, (Open) WorldCat.org, RSS, mySpace, YouTube, LibraryThing, the Long Tail, and Web 2.0/Library 2.0 social systems. I'm sure there's a lot more we haven't gotten on the list yet.