I haven't been feeling well the last couple of days, so my blogging energy is down. But there's been a lot of great posts to read. I discovered a way to read blogs on the the train without an Internet connection using Google Reader offline. So far it works okay, but it's kind of a truncated way to read blog posts (with links that don't go anywhere!).
Continuing on the theme of an earlier post about upgrading catalogers' skill set, I want to look at resources that discussed this issue. Here's one by Karen Calhoun that I found about a month ago, Being a Librarian: Metadata and Metadata Specialists in the Twenty-first Century [PDF]. It's more philosophical, less nitty gritty practical. However, in the footnotes is a slide presentation with text also by Karen Calhoun, Technology, Productivity and Change in Library Technical Services. Some selections:
"Clearly, the technical services landscape is a challenging one, one in which we must ask our people to know more about computers, data sets, the Web, and how they work than ever before."
"Computer literacy is the foundation of both information literacy and IT fluency. It is the basis for getting control of your computer, rather than letting it control you. It is the basis for maximizing computer-based productivity gains in our departments. It is however, limited, as computer literacy tends to involve learning about specific hardware and software applications, at a given point in time. Nevertheless, without computer literacy, people cannot gain either information literacy or IT fluency."
"The concept of IT fluency is more germane to this paper. It goes beyond computer literacy in that it involves an understanding of the concepts of information technology, especially applying problem-solving and critical thinking to using information technology. The result of IT fluency is a graduated, increasingly skilled use of information technology."
"Another important aspect of IT fluency is the ability to apply resourcefulness and critical-thinking to using technology. These characteristics are the engine of innovation and creative-problem solving. "
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