Week One:

REQUIRED READING NOTES

OCLC Report: "2004 Information Format Trends: Content, Not Containers"
http://library.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p267701coll5/id/291

• In an 18 month period, trends of new content were found to be increasing in library collections. This new content were items such as books, journals, and CD's. All items had a significant impact on the search and obtain process.
• "Digital content is often syndicated instead of being packaged and distributed, and access is provided on an as-needed basis to the information consumer by providers outside the library space (OCLC)
• Article was created to update predictions of format trends for material collected by libraries over time. Authors take a look at growing phenomena of content being published and shared outside of the traditional library setting.
• Users are becoming less format-dependent to access content. Process of acquisition and delivery of content need to accommodate the expectations of the upcoming communities.
• "56 million American adults are wireless ready" in 2004!
• Self-publishing is rising while print publishing is down. E-books are becoming much more prominent.
• Discussion of how to meet the rising challenge of the e-book leads to the authors asserting that librarians need to pay attention to how content is found, created, and used by consumers and producers.
• Marshall McLuhan "the medium is the message" in 1964. interpreted as technology being a driving force in the change of pace.
•  Convergence of technologies is very significant to the delivery of content and how it is woven in people's lives.
• Addresses the use of blogs, stating percentages of people who find blogs extremely useful and honest (circa 2004)
• E-books, online journals, digital titles, DVDs by mail or self-viewing service are forcing objects such as CDs, DVDs, and books obselete.

Vocabulary
format agnostic - content consumers do not care which container- book, journal, blog, webpage - information comes from.
premium content - the entirety of an article that might require registration and/or payment to view.
data mining tools - increasingly sophisticated search engines that help in the discovery process of items.

"Information Literacy and Information Technology Literacy: New Components in the Curriculum for a Digital Culture" by Clifford Lynch
http://old.cni.org/staff/cliffpubs/info_and_it_literacy.pdf

• personal views expressed by author on the subject of a call to study information technology literacy. published 1998
• Information literacy deals with content and communication, including authorship, information retrieval, and organization of the research process. Information analysis also assesses data and evaluates it.
• Content is found through forms of texts, images, video, computer simulations, and multimedia works. serves many purposes such as news, art, entertainment, education, research, adverts, politics, commerce, documents, history, etc. 
• information technology shapes publication, access, and dissemination of technology - intends to enable communication and information access.
• Two general perspectives when discussing information technology. 
• emphasizing skills in use of word processing, spreadsheets, computer tech, and web browsing. 
• understanding how technologies and data systems work, on a more technical level.
• Author feels strongly on inclusion of fluency of software tools, grasping principle designs for researching, and understanding current authoring technologies
•  "As computer-based searching has become increasingly central to information finding and research, an understanding of how searching systems work, and the interplay between indexing techniques... searching, and information accessibility is becoming essential"

Thoughts 

These articles are outdated, but provided an interesting look at some of the work conducted by a few upcoming researchers and advocates for digitization in the library system. Now that we are ten years past the OCLC report, it is interesting to read how fast the digital world was growing even though the internet was still a fairly new concept. Much of the data reflects the impact that digital collections were making back then. They show that these ideas to convert the physical library to a digital are still significant today, with many libraries taking the digitized approach to much of their collections. 

I liked Clifford Lynch's article on Information literacy because it was written in a way that someone who might not be familiar with the subject could understand. He writes passionately on the subject, noting such important things as general perspectives on the topic and also defining terms that are pertinent to the topic. I agree with his sentiment that grasping principle designs for online research would positively enhance the information science field. It's amazing that this was written in 1998, as it seems very relevant to our more advanced information culture now in 2014.

Questions

1. What are the currently reported trends of the past four years by the OCLC? Do specific trends appear significantly enough to record?
2. Is digitization enough to save the modern library? These reports are outdated and suggest that digitizing would be most effective, but are there alternatives to digitizing content?
3. What is the role of information literacy today? Is it still as effective as Lynch believed it was in 1998?