Thanks to Judith Siess at OPL Plus for poining out Kathryn Greenhill’s 21 reasons why learning about emerging technologies is part of every librarian’s job… with the following list:
“..1. Performing core business better…
2. Increased productivity…
3. Gaining international perspective…
4. Finding out what other libraries are doing…
5. Understanding all formats of information…
6. Trend watching…
7. Repurposing our traditional skills…
8. Understanding technical background when dealing with vendors…
9. Being prepared for when a tool moves out of early adoption phase…
10. Understanding the redefinition of our core business…
11. Managing our tech-savvy workers…
12. No-one else knows your users as well as you do…
13. Fun….
14. Providing better service to our clients…
15. So we can tell the IT department what we want…
16. Our professional users are required to keep up…
17. Many user interfaces have become ‘pseudo-standards’…
18. Can’t predict the future–-so experimentation is insurance…
19. Crowds are fickl…
20. Collaborate better…
21. Experimenting increases skills…”
