Conferencing again

I've just had another conference paper accepted, yeah w00t and spl0rk!

This time it is for the Australian School Librarians Association, XX Biennial Conference. Learning, Literature and Literacies, 2nd to 5th October 2007 Adelaide Convention Centre. so, loyal readers, here is your preview...

Their Ghosts Stalk the Shelves:
the information seeking behaviours of the millennial generation

Millennials, Generation Y, the Myspace Generation, MyPod Generation, Generation Next, Nintendo Generation, the Cynical Generation. Call them what you will, the students coming through our schools at the moment are in many ways more prepared for what the education system will throw at them, than any generation before them. They are full of confidence in their own ability and so sure of their own information finding abilities that most fail to see any need (beyond some recreational reading) for their school and public libraries. This high level of information literacy should have advantages both for them and their librarians but many of them are failing to engage with libraries and are failing to see the relevance of outmoded concepts, like authority, in their information sources.

So how do we show a cynical generation that we have something to offer?

This paper will examine ways in which librarians can be integrated into student’s learning. It will look at methods librarians can use to draw the students in. It has been suggested that millennials find referrals from their contacts to be more valid than information gathered from more traditional sources. These students don’t know of a time before the internet, so they are not pen and paper thinkers, they are not lineal thinkers, they think in a web. But not the old web, these are the people who think web 2.0. So, this paper will consider questions like; does your library have a myspace page? Have you considered adding all of your students to your friends list? Do you edit wikipedia articles and if you do, how do you make your students aware just how hip and trendy you are. And more to the point, will editing wikipedia no longer be cool by the time I present this paper. Will everyone under the age of 30 leave myspace en masse once it is overrun by librarians and how can you possibly stay one step ahead of all these trends?