"Today its all Google, no Gogol"

Alright, so we live in a Web 2.0 world in which, if we are being honest with ourselves, we have finally started to feel comfortable. I am wondering if I am falling victim to this hyper-new world, where attention spans have been halved and blinking lights are the only attention holders worth a darn. (I am also wondering if this is a stupid thing to keep thinking about considering how long The Golden Notebook, and its 500 pages, has been sitting on my bedside table!)

That is why this article from the Chicago Tribune caught my attention: "Technology and Books: Is the Novel Too Much for our Technology-Addled Minds?" In it, John Keilman seems just as torn as I and offers no real solutions or conclusions.

I'm not as willing to blame technology as the author of the article and I do not suffer from the shake-your-head-slowly-at-the-youth-of-today mentality for one reason, and one reason alone: The Twilight Series. If the youth of today can get through that, they can get through anything.

Yes, I sometimes can't help but to check my text messages while having dinner and I love to Google (or Bing!). The problem is we haven't realized what the children are looking for - their own voice. They are just as able to read War and Peace as I was or as my parents were, but they are looking to define their reality, their creative effect on society.

As a librarian and bookseller, I commend them and look forward to attempting to meet their needs. More audio, more eBooks, quicker response times, full text articles - bring it on!

Sure, we are going to loose some personal contact, some pleasures (the smell of old books that people, myself included, wax eloquently about), but what we are going to gain... well, that I am eager to see.

For any generation who can read the entire Twilight series, well, I don't think I'll have to worry so much about their short attention spans. Just about their taste!

Transferable Skills and the Librarian

With the job market the way it is, I am almost sad to send students out into the horrible job market. And, honestly speaking, Seattle's economy is no where near as bad as most other places in the country.

Students often, before graduation, ask us librarians for help in finding jobs. The short answer is, beyond showing them the places to look, helping them write resumes, and pointing them to some (?hopelessly outdated?) books on interviewing, there is not much we can do.

That is why this post, "The Power of Transferable Skills," from The Simple Dollar caught my attention.

Though not a simple, quick fix, it does give some excellent advice about how one job or one skill is a brick in your wall. That, through cross training and creative thinking, you are making your future career all the more achievable.

This started me thinking about my career path - basically, why am I employed today? In my current position, paraprofessional in the User Services department of an academic library, I use the administrative skills learned from being an office assistant in a law firm, the customer services skills I learned from working in a large bookstore, the marketing skills from years networking as a babysitter/nanny, and the library-specific skills from four years as a Tech Services student assistant in college and as an intern in a public library's archives.

More importantly, however, how will I be using the skills from this job in the future? The most important thing I am learning is management, and that is a skill that will only become more important as I move on (and up).

So, I hope that this article will help people, as it helped me, see the bigger picture. And though this will not help my patrons today, maybe it will be a comfort when they look to the future: the crap job of today is a transferable skill of tomorrow!