As some of you may know, we were closed for the first half of Friday. We had an all-staff in-service. Yeah!
So, what is a library in-service? Well, three times a year the entire San Jose Public Library staff comes together around a certain theme, with speakers, panels, and, of course, coffee and tea. As always, my favorite part of the in-service is seeing coworkers from other libraries that I rarely get to see. Today’s theme was “The Future of Libraries” or something to that effect. Past topics have been things like “Library Safety,” “Serving Youth,” and “Customer Service.” Our keynote speaker today, someone from the California State Library, was kind of boring but showed us a number of examples of emerging technologies, e.g. ebook readers, social networking sites, and most cool, Hello Kitty robots.
We were challenged to come up with how we thought libraries of the future would be. What kind of services and help will we offer? What kinds of materials will we have? What will our buildings be like? What will our customers want in the future? What will our organizational values be? Will the internet continue to change libraries and users? How?
