Jenny Levine, The Shifted Librarian, points out a recent survey that finds 90% of US college students own a cell phone. Nationally, 171.2 million Americans have cell phones. And cell phones aren’t just for talking, as we Americans are sending 2.5 billion text messages a month.

Jenny’s point: “you can tell yourself that these trends won’t affect libraries, but you’d just be burying your head in the sand.”

Coincidentally, Ken “Caesar” Fisher posted at ArsTechnica about student technology trends as well:

When I started college in the early 90s, I lived in a dorm. A few things were clear to me after being there for a week. First, in our block of 16 students, my Zeos 486 DX2/66 ruled the roost. No one came close to it, but then again, not everyone even had a computer.

Now, 90% of students have a computer and 55% have a game console. Further, and back to Jenny’s point, 62% are using their cell phone for text messages and 41% can access the internet from the cell phone.

Related, in an academics and technology way: Seb at Many 2 Many reported recently on CiteULike and Connotea, linklogging and shared bookmarking services:

…The rapidly-developing CiteULike looks quite interesting. It borrows from del.icio.us’ simple interface and social software features, but it is tailor-made for academic papers that are available online. It lets you build a “personal library” (here’s the one I just started), recording bibliographic information and enabling you to tag papers for future retrieval and group sharing. For instance, here is an ongoing stream of papers on blogging, collected by various individuals. Development is very much alive, as you can see from the development journal and the discussion list.

Tagging may be the best new concept I’ve seen in a while, and I’ve been anxious to see it enter the academe.

Posted February 14, 2005 by Casey Bisson
Categories: Libraries & Networked Information. .

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