Friday, How I do Love Thee! How I do Loathe Thee!

Now that I've started Graduate School and am taking classes during the truncated summer session (10 rather than 14 weeks), I am of two minds about Fridays. On the one hand, I love the fact that it's Friday because that means that I don't have to be up at the ass-crack of dawn in the morning to be at work. On the other hand, Friday means the end of the week, which means one less week in which to get done all the projects we need to get done. It's kind of a weird paradox, and I might come to grips with it about the time that I graduate. :-)

In class last night, my professor extended the deadline on the project that was due next week. I am glad about that. It's not like I needed the full week that he extended it... just another day or so should be fine. As he put it, though, extending the deadline on this project is sort of like "robbing Peter to pay Paul" because concentrating longer on this project takes time away from the bigger project due in a few weeks. I'm sort of concentrating on both, so it's not too bad for me. The project I'm currently the most concerned about is the assignement that's due on Monday. It's not a terribly long assignment, but it has caused me to totally re-think the idea of "Reference" in a library setting, and paradigm shifts usually take a bit of getting used to.

As an Undergrad at the same University I'm now attending as a Grad student, Reference was a totally different beast than it is now. To put a scope on this, I graduated with my BA in 1995, a mere 15 years ago. In that time, information technology has exploded and so much is done online now - including my classes - that would have been considered practically science fiction when I graduated in 1995. When I was in college from 1991-1995, HTML was new and exciting and always hand-coded. None of this Frontpage frou-frou nonsense. ;-) You didn't find graphical internet browsers; text-based browers like LYNX were the standard. I remember looking at the internet via Netscape in 1995 and was amazed, even if the images weren't the near-photographic quality they are now. If you wanted to find a journal article via an online search, you used something called InfoTrac, which was a pain in the butt to use and navigate. Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature would usually get you to your information a LOT faster and more easily. 20 years ago, Librarians were worried that TELNET Gopher would make them obselete, now it's Google. Getting back to my original point, the Reference Desk - which used to be in the Reference Service area in the mid-1990's when I was there - is now the "Research Assistance" desk housed within the Commons area. I wager that most of the reference questions they get are either via text chat/text message or e-mail. The assignment due Monday required me to observe the "Reference Desk" and report my findings. I observed this desk for an hour and a half, and there was only 1 in-person reference query. If that's not the changing face of libraries, I don't know what is.

This stroll down amnesia lane got me thinking... if I've noticed these changes in technology having taken place in the last 15-20 years, I have to wonder what it's like to live inside the mind of my Great Aunt who has lived from steam engines to space exploration.

I suppose that it's the height of irony that I'm having a discussion about the changes in information technology via a blog. Such is life.