Grown Up Digital

For those of you interested in generational stereotyping - and who isn't? - there is a new book by Don Tapscott, Grown up digital: how the net generation is changing your world (McGraw-Hill, 2008). I assume that the ambiguity of the term "grown up" in the title is intentional. Tapscott coined the term "the net generation" in 1997.

Reading a review of the book in a recent issue of The Economist, I was interested to read that "eight norms . . . define Net Geners". This generation, we are told

• values freedom and choice in everything they do
• loves customisation and personalisation
• scrutinises everything
• demands integrity and openness
• wants entertainment and play in education and work as well as social life
• loves to collaborate
• expects everything to happen fast
• expects constant innovation

These all seem to me to be good values and preferences and characteristics of a reasonable person in contemporary society. Nice checklist! I wonder what it means for libraries?

Word of the day

Today's word is librariany. OK, it's not that much of a word, more logically obvious than essential, and Google only indexes 350 instances. But I was checking it out because I need to use it in a presentation and I couldn't think of a synonym. Browsing through the examples that
turned up on the search, I did come to the conclusion that librariany is a useful word - and Australia's leading library blogger found it useful too. The usage includes some positives (used for library skills), some negatives (used for librarian stereotypes) and some fairly neutral or descriptive used.

What I also found curious was that when the Google search results came up they were accompanied by advertisements for library courses at Charles Sturt (you came top, CSU, well done), RMIT and UniSA (being there was good, too), as well as something called the Wallace Foundation. Uncanny. And lucrative.