Tuesday, February 08, 2005

Richard's presentation mentioned again

Alane at "It's All Good" says:
On Sunday night (Feb 6), as Alice has posted, Richard Madeus spoke to Members Council delegates about gizmos, and storage (this presentation will be available on the OCLC web site). He noted that portable computing will allow us to carry massive amounts of content around with us--as we've told you here, Thom Hickey of OCLC Research loaded all the WorldCat records on a 40G iPod and had space left over. Not the indexes or a search interface--just the records. Now, why any of us might want to carry Worldcat in our pockets escapes me just yet--although perhaps the very romance of carrying a goodly amount of documentary heritage in your pocket might be reason enough.

I can imagine that one reason I don't know why it would be All Good to have more bib records in my pocket than any library on the planet has is...because I am not under 30. In fact, amazingly (to me) I turn 50 in 2006. As I don't have children, I can only survey the real digital divide from afar but I am pretty sure that John "Got Game" Beck and others are correct...that the "digital natives" (as Richard Madeus called them) are fundamentally different from we (older) "digital immigrants", even those of us who are gizmo-savvy.

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