Sunday, May 15, 2005

Articles and presentations by Stephen Abram

Friday, I had the pleasure of attending a workshop given by Jane Dysart and Stephen Abram for SCRLC in Binghamton, NY. The workshop was entitled "Recreating Services with New Technologies: Service Strategies for the Millennium" and was the first in a series of workshops SCRLC is hold on Library: Place, Service, or Both?

Steve, who is the vice president of innovation for Sirsi, does a lot of thinking about libraries and their services. Not only does he do work in this area, but he talks and writes about it constantly. There is a page on the Sirsi site with many presentations and articles that he has done. The presentation "Recreating Services with New Technologies: Service Strategies for the Millennium" is similar to what was presented on Friday, but not exactly the same. His presentation entitled "Next Generation Libraries: Bricks, Clicks & Tricks" also contains some of the information he presented on Friday. Unfortunately, you can't hear the running commentary that he and Jane provided, including examples that were very up-to-date (as in things that had occurred the day before).

Looking down through the list of articles and presentations, one that stood out to me was "The Kids are Alright! Millennials and their Information Behaviors." According to the research, libraries lost Gen X. Gen X -- in general -- doesn't care about the library. We can't afford to lose the Millennials. And in order not to lose them, we must be relevant to their needs. We must especially be aware of how they want to access information (and when).

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