Thoughts on Hirshorn and Liu

My immediate reaction to both of these articles was a personal one.  I had noticed that they had both been published back in 2008, and could not help but compare their visions of the future to what I desired and encountered as a 21^st century student researcher using the webpages of multiple schools and different organizations.  In some ways, they were spot on.  Other predictions seem to me to be a bit off the mark, however.

Environment Scan, by Hirshon, first off struck me by the fact that it has a very “outside looking in” perspective when it came to discussing Generation Y.  Using phrases such as “to reach generation Y”, it made it sound as if the author were an anthropologist describing their attempts at communicating with a remote jungle tribe.  If a birth year of 1982 is used as the beginning of generation Y (as is fairly common) then in 2008 there would be fully educated adults that could’ve assisted the author in providing concrete answers and examples of what it was his/her generation wanted and expected.  Instead the article uses broad generalizations based on other articles. 

As I mentioned above, some of the prognostications seemed a bit off to me.  One stand out idea was that of avatars becoming a normal part of online interaction.  With the advent of software like Skype and Facetime, the up and coming generation will come to expect not some graphical representation of a person or themselves, but an actual videochat/conference face to face with the real thing.  Additionally, one of the greatest impediments to the realm of virtual reference is the lack of non-verbal cues when trying to assist patrons.  Via chat and email both, nuance is lost when providing information and instruction.  An avatar would not be able to provide anywhere near as much information as a real person could about how the reference interview was going. 

The gaming and social networking emphasis by the articles also is not quite right.  While aspects of both can be applied to the web presence of academic libraries (and other institutions), I find that in fact the rising generation compartmentalizes their lives within the virtual realm.  They’ll facebook and tumblr, but they don’t necessarily want to do so with their employers or their schools.  Adding a social component to the catalogs and research portals of the library however, would strike more of a chord than would the library attempting to connect with patrons via the social networks that they use strictly for social purposes. 

The Liu article takes some of the general observations of the Hirshon article and applies it practically to the homepage of an academic library.  Liu is definitely on the right track in pointing out that what the newest generation of researchers will be expecting is a “seamless, one-stop information environment that minimizes users’ way-finding effort and nutures the formation and dissemination of knowledge, ideas, and experiences”.   Now that the web 2.0 idea is a number of years old and interacting with the virtual environment of web pages is the norm, personalization of a research portal in an effort to make information searches as painless and as accurate as possible would indeed be extremely attractive to the digital native generation.  That being said it is important that the personalization be quick and easy, and also a one-time thing, in which past customizations can be permanent yet changeable, and research history can be saved.

Liu also goes into great detail to design and describe the perfect layout and content of the ideal academic library homepage.  Again he uses the emphasis on ease of use that is of such importance to 21^st century researchers’ choice of online tools as a guide to how a page should be laid out.  All the functionalities should be as intuitive as possible and when it comes to navigation, need as few clicks as possible, as few page jumps and scrolling as possible.

There is one important aspect to all of this that the Liu article did not address, namely that of the promotion needed to ensure that students are actively going to the library webpage in order to do their research.  I cannot help but reflect upon what my alma mater and recent employer, University of Maryland, College Park, has recently done.  Upon finding that many students are simply googling rather than going to the OPAC, they have totally gone all in with OCLC’s Worldcat, providing a UMCP skin on Worldcat local to guide patrons to the resources they need.  The old catalog is still there, but is no longer the main focus.  Why the switch?  Worldcat entries for items show up in google searches.  The idea being, no longer can we expect the patrons to come to the library even virtually (library homepage on the web), the library must go to where the patrons are (Google).