Bottom Line on Electronic Libraries -Reply

[Diane Nahl]

I agree that the general public needs and will get simpler appliances.
However, every student, at every level, will enter the trend to become
more internet literate.

I see this as the trend because in the history of information technology
the end user has always pressured the experts to give away their knowledge
of information retireval principles and techniques.  In the 1970's when we
first saw electronic databases emerge, librarians learned IR skills and
were intermediaries.  Many wondered at the time whether library users or
researchers would want to learn to do their own searches.  Many thought
they wouldn't because it was too arcane and technical.  As we can see,
they were wrong, and the number of end users learning to search in schools
and colleges and universitys has continued to multiply.  That is the
primary reason that libraries have spent so much on automation and will
continue to do so.

Everyone wants it to be simpler, but we know that simpler often means
less than satisfactory results in retrievals.  Students from k-12+ will
still learn IR skills because they need to become very good at information
retrieval for their careers and for their personal lives too.  Right now
everyone is learning the same skills--we're in a transition period for
skill acquisition that will last for at least a decade before we see most
entering undergrads coming to college knowing complex search skills.  Some
areas may experience this advance in skill level of end users sooner or
later than that, depending on resources and training available in the
schools.

In the end there will be tiered systems to permit people to use whatever
skill level they have.

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_/  Dr. Diane Nahl, Assistant Professor                  _/   From now  _/
_/  School of Library and Information Studies            _/   on we     _/
_/  University of Hawaii, Honolulu, HI 96822             _/   are all   _/
_/  http://www2.hawaii.edu/slis/nahl/nahl.html           _/   lifelong  _/
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