Reflection Blog #4: Planning for Participatory Services (Wild Card)

The biggest thing that stood out to me in this module was the idea of technolust standing in the way of careful planning. As librarians, we must always keep our community top of mind. This means that while we want to provide access to emerging technologies, tech is not our purpose, but the people are. Doing our SWOT analysis and community scan are crucial whenever considering the implementation of new technologies in our libraries. It is also important to always refer back to our Strategic Plan. This is the document that we have presented to our board, our governmental leadership, and our community and is the commitment we have made to them.

I appreciated the different “states” of being related to technology in the library that Michael Stephens discussed in his 2012 article about technolust. I particularly relate to the technophobe state. While I am not exactly a technophobe, I actually love what libraries are doing with emerging technologies today, I do tend to be a bit more cautious with new technologies. The extremely fast pace of technological advancement overwhelms me and the ethical considerations with tech like artificial intelligence (AI) tend to make me shy away from them. This is something I am working on and I will have to be cognizant of the ways in which I might inadvertently stand in the way of progress in my library.

I enjoyed the video about the e-sports program at the Cleveland Public Library because it reminded me that not every new technology-based program has to be something brand new. The CPL successfully harnesses cutting edge technology in the form of gaming computers to provide a service that isn’t new at all. Digital gaming has existed for decades. The CPL didn’t need to reinvent the wheel, so to speak, to provide a valuable service to their gaming community. They only needed to invest in the updated systems to make it the best for their gamers. I appreciate this perspective because it can be easy to get caught up in new ideas and forget that we have existing systems that we can create programming around.