Joan Lippincott from the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) gave a talk at the National Library on 29 March 2010. The talk was opened up for LAS members to attend.

She talked about today’s users, who they are and want do they want. She highlighted the ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, the Project Information Literacy report “Lessons Learned: How College Students Seek Information in the Digital Age“, and the Studying students: The Undergraduate Research Project at the University of Rochester which found that today’s students:

• owned a laptop and an Internet-capable handphone.
• believed that they were expert or skilled users of technology and searching the Internet effectively
• developed an information-seeking strategy reliant on a small set of common information sources—close at hand, tried and true
• communicated using new media with the use of social networking sites rising rapidly

The students created digital documents and digital objects and shared them on various new platforms like Facebook and Youtube. These students also understood privacy of information, however they made different choices about sharing personal information. Even though students owned laptops and Internet-capable handphones, libraries found that public PCs were still needed as they did not carry their laptops with them all the time and they did not necessarily access the Internet on their handphone because of the cost.

Joan mentioned that if libraries have access to image or audio resources, they should make it known to their users. When their students are working on their theses, she encourage librarians to educate them about open access, creative commons and copyright issues.

What can libraries do to be relevant to today’s students? Joan suggested moving away from just having library-owned or licensed materials to having a mix of library-owned and web-based resources. Also to move away from plain text to lively interactive displays. Some web resources she mentioned were: C-SPAN for their videos, Trove, Smithsonian Institute for their exhibitions and images, David Rumsey Map Collection and iSpecies.org for its image-rich way of presenting academic content.

Some initiatives by libraries include the New York Public Library whose catalogue engages users in tagging their materials.

Joan emphasized that it was important to understand the needs of your users. You could initiate a pilot project which did not have to be perfect and to learn from the project.

Some of the questions that the audience asked Joan included:

How do you get the support of management for library initiatives? It was suggested to get the support of the key stakeholders, e.g. faculty in an academic setting which would show the importance of the initiative.  It is important to align them to the organization’s goals, e.g. propose to bring students into the library to teach them about electronic resources as part of the academic program and connect this with the request of renovation of facilities.

How can libraries help users handle large data sets? Libraries could be the curators for the data sets and to make them available to others. There is a also a trend for libraries to provide data services. What are the skills required for a data curator or data librarian? The key ones would be subject expertise and an understanding of data curation.

CNI works to identify trends relevant to libraries and information management and its papers are available at its website.

She suggested being aware of innovative services and learning from them. Libraries who were successful should disseminate information about what they have done and the problems they faced so that we can learn from each other. It was also important to be flexible and to remove services that were not being used and make room for new services. Our users want information that is personal, practical, fun and useful.

Contributed by Yeo Pin Pin