Anybody who questioned the Pew Internet and American Life report about how teens use the internet and how they expect conversations and interactivity from the online services they use might do well to take a look at this comment on my Chernobyl Tour story:

Student Looking for Info that your not give us
February 3rd, 2006 10:11

you people suck. We have to do a school report and you are not giving us any info on what happened to the people, and the environmetn, we need a story from someone and about someone who lived through this inccident.

Ignore the bad spelling, punctuation, and grammar. Ignore the personal criticism. Instead, think about enormous shift of worldviews that allows a reader to make that comment about a popular story on a top-ranked website. Yes, the internet really is conversational — even if some people may be bad conversationalists.

Now imagine instead that the comment was on a related post at a library’s reference blog. Kindly worded or not, that’s a reference question. It’s an opportunity to serve a patron who obviously isn’t being served by traditional library services, and it’s a huge argument for libraries to make sure they’re blogging this stuff and fully participating in the Google Economy. Afterall, the person who made that comment certainly didn’t search the library.

Keep reading: the language of your website, institutional blogging done right, and designing library services for today.

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Drawing from John Blyberg’s ILS Customer’s Bill of Rights and
The Social Customer Manifesto, Jenny Levine offers this Online Library User Manifesto:

• I want to have a say, so you need to provide mechanisms for this to happen online.
   
• I want to know when something is wrong, and what you’re going to do to fix it.
   
• I want to help shape services that I’ll find useful.
   
• I want to connect with others that share my interests.
   
• I want to use your services on my schedule, not yours. I don’t care if it’s noon, midnight, Sunday, or Christmas Eve.
   
• I want to know how your library works.
   
• I want to tell you when you’re screwing up. Conversely, I’m happy to tell you the things you are doing well.
   
• I want to interact with institutions that act in a transparent and ethical manner.
   
• I want to know what’s next. We’re in partnership…where should we go?
   

The basis of this, is of course the critical mass of users who are making online services a part their everyday lives. And it’s not just the millennial generation, as it turns out that it’s the 35 to 44-year olds who are most likely to buy movie tickets online, just as one example. But a recent Pew Internet Project study on millennials does reveal an interesting trend, one that the above manifesto seeks to address:

These teens would say that the companies that want to provide them entertainment and knowledge should think of their relationship with teens as one where they are in a conversational partnership, rather than in a strict producer-consumer, arms-length relationship.

And if that isn’t clear enough, take a look at the message in the marketing world.

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As part of a larger message to faculty returning from winter break, our CIO offered this summary of how he sees advancing internet use affecting higher education:

Are you familiar with blogs and podcasts? Google them, or look them up in Wikipedia. Some of you may already be using these new tools. Others may think these terms are the latest in a sea of techno-jargon. Regardless, your millennial students — the NetGens — are using these new technologies — along with the ubiquitous cell phone — more and more. Google is a first step in most research and you’ll be seeing more references and quotes from Wikipedia. They have more access to more technology than our generations could have ever dreamed of… and more of it is coming right to their cell phones! I’m not suggesting that you suddenly change your teaching processes, but you should be aware of how this generation gets and interacts with information. And to know them is to understand better how to work and communicate with them. Help them to be discerning with the wealth of information they have.

There are lots of studies and research written on our students today. Here are some of my own observations, as a parent and teacher.

• Students’ span of attention may be short, but their capacity to absorb more information and multitask is significant.
   
• Google is the first point in their research. Wikipedia is fast becoming a knowledge base of choice.
   
• This generation of students has vast amounts of information at their fingertips and phone, but they tend to trust too much of what they find as valid.
   
• Students tend to spend more time on their phones and text messaging than they do in email.
   
• Students walk to classes with their MP3 players in their ears. They walk out with cell phones dialed.
   
• They spend significant time online and connected, yet they know or care little about the underlying technology.
   
• They share personal information far more readily in blogs, Facebook.com and other web sites.
   
• Sales of watches are declining because young people have clocks on their cell phones.
   
• All the above are generalizations. Not all students are as ‘wired’ as we assume. We need to be mindful that some students come from homes where there is no internet, no computer and no cell phones.
   

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