Sara Kelly Johns, who is running for ALA President, recently asked “What technologies should ALA move toward to engage members?”

I felt that 8bitlibrary.com, being a new-media-in-libraries kind of place, should have an official response!

I wrote back to her:

I can’t think of a more technologically engaged group of people than librarians. Because of that fact, this is a hard question to answer; it’s like asking to “look into the future”.

That being said, hash tags are big on twitter. #edchat is a great one that I follow that is used (primarily) by K-12 educators, and chats go on every night on different topics. ALA would get a huge response if they had an official hashtag on twitter that they used to discuss set topics.

To add to that idea, something like #ALAQnA would be great. The #edchat model is a terrific one to follow: a few nights at a week, at a set time, all of the #edchat twitterers respond-to/converse-about topics like “How can educators effectively assess students in the 21st century?”. The conversations are amazing if you follow the chats live, and they stay on twitter for the conversation to continue in the days (and sometimes weeks) to follow.
ALA has a diverse group of dedicated tweeters, all of whom have terrific (and sometimes vastly different) ideas on the future of libraries and library services. And librarians have been doing the hashtag convo thing for awhile. This week, in fact, is #libday4.
And, since this is posted on 8bitlibrary.com, let me suggest some topics:
  • What are your library’s best-practices for loanable gaming collections?
  • How can gaming-in-libraries grow beyond the teen demographic?
  • What are emerging medias that you see as relevant to the future of libraries?
  • What can ALA do to support the growing gaming community?
  • When developing your game collection, where do you go for reviews?

I understand that this is a “small” answer to a “big” question, but we should be proud, as a profession, that we are thinking so “big”!

What would engage you?