A friend of mine earned her library degree in the late sixties.  As the Internet was slowly added into the public domain, she took seminars to familiarize herself with the new technology.  I was privy to a conversation between her and my immediate supervisor about search terms for the OPAC and search engines.  The librarian in question said she always typed in a full question when searching and typed in every part of a title or author in the OPAC.  From my experience, these tool do not react well to wordy phrases.  The main conversation point was that she spent twenty minutes trying to find an item for a patron, but her methods weren't working.  My supervisor, who had early Internet technology integrated in her library degree, was aware of only using key search phrases and leaving out stop words.  The patron's item was found in a couple minutes.

Search methods, in my opinion, are how librarians will be used to the most in the future.  If older librarians and new librarians are not aware of how to use their tools to the best degree, how will anything be found?

Our entire world is going digital, for the most part, but I was watching a news program the other day about solar flares interfering with our power sources.  One occurred in the late 19th or early 20th century and caused some damage to what little electricity there was.  Back in the day, a power outage was no big deal and it still isn't...on a small scale.  Here we are putting everything in a digital format and deleting our paper prints.  What would happen if our power went our for good and all our resources were destroyed or too outdates to be helpful?  Do we conserve trees and space by having up to date, easy access information or do we continue to print books that take up space, kill trees, require page turning, indexing, cross-referencing, and collect dust?

We can always commit ourselves to darkness and find out.

The good thing about this new program is that the catalog has better search results. I used to enter an item for a subject search and only get items from a title search.  Now the subject search works great, but another problem is that if you misspell a search term there are no "suggestions" with correct spellings.  

I think amazon.com should sell their database information to libraries so they get an expanded amount of information and subject searchings, except the catalogs would be individualized for each library.   

The library where I work recently updated its circulation program.  The problem with this "upgrade" is that it is a whole lot slower than the older version and a user has to click twice as much to reach one tool.  The machines we use are about five years old and constantly lock up when they are over exerted.  I believe if our machines were newer the circulation program would be faster, but that does not fix the amount of clicking.

It is as if the programmers did not ask anyone who uses the program on a day to day basis how to improve it.  It is easier to access some information, but what used to be easy is now harder.

There needs to be collaboration between the programmers and the users to create a program that is an improvement rather than a hindrance.

In relation to my previous post about elderly patrons and technology, this post has to do with the younger generation. Kids generally know more about computers, because they have grown up with the technology and have developed an innate ability for it.  When I was work this afternoon, the children's librarian had a heated discussion with a child's mother.  The mother asked the librarian to monitor her child's web time while she browsed in the adult section.  The librarian peeked over once and saw some inappropriate pictures on the child's screen.  The mother was called and she began to yell at the librarian.  There were firewalls loaded onto the children's computer to block "bad' webpages.  Somehow the kid overrode them and the mother blamed the librarian for the kid's actions.  It took about an our to reprogram the computer.  Kids know too much for their own good sometimes.

Since I work in two libraries, one would think I have the opportunity to work with a lot of patrons and their computer troubleshooting.  That is not so, most of my time is spent either archiving materials or organizing them.  The librarians handle the computer troubleshooting. One day I did find myself sitting at a computer terminal trying to explain to an elderly woman how to right click on an icon.  Her mind was one a five minute loop, because she kept coming back to me asking how to right click with the mouse again and again.  I know you have to be patient and respectful to the elderly, but where is the fine line between annoyance and patience drawn?  

After reading about how bits and bytes work, I am extremely confused about how binary code is written.  I really don't think being a computer specialist is the route for me to go in libraries.  I do understand that it is important to know how to use general software programs and basic troubleshooting.  That way I will be able to help patrons when they have computer problems.  Binary code reminds me of the Dewey Decimal System and Library of Congress Cataloging Systems, in that they have their own individual languages that need to be understood before they can be used.

I am old fashioned in terms that I have kept my thoughts down on paper and off the Internet till this moment.  I hope that I do well in this class and brush up on my computer basics, which has I have failed to keep up with in the past decade.  I feel very old after that statement.