Week 7: #17 Blog About Technology

It's hard to know where to start about the impact of technology on our society -particularly libraries. I was born in the 1960's. I can remember as a child using the card catalog at my library (in a once large sized city). You had to look for a title or author card in a drawer in the catalog (usually located too high or with someone using that same drawer when you wanted to use it!). Then you would go to the shelf, only to find out the book wasn't there... If you wanted to see if it was checked out or what may have happened to it, you had to go stand in a line to ask the librarian about it.

By my college years, most of our libraries had the OPAC and it was amazing to think you could know instantly if a book was checked in (actually you still had to do the old-fashioned act of going to the shelf and looking for the book -- something we still have to do in libraryland unless we use ebooks or something!). Another technology breakthrough was that even if a library book was checked out, you could instantly request it on the computer!

When I graduated from library science graduate school in 1995 the Internet was just starting to become popular. The semester after I graduated, our library science program began to emphasize webpage development and computers in a big way. I had no concept of how technology would change my world and pretty much everyone's in just a short time.

In libraryland, we now use technology each day through ecollections, laptops, WiFi, wiki's and of course, all the innovations we're learning through iHCPL.