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So how do you take these Digital Native realities and build a set of strategies that support your organization's digital initiatives, especially when technology is quickly and constantly shifting? More information about our users and their expectations--and as a result, the skills we will need in order to make these new tools and experiences a reality.

"build your strategies to support the core values of your users, not to support the advancement of technology. " - Yes, but the article just showed how these values were shaped by technology, noting how the digital generation is different from older generations because of technology.

I think the "engagement, enrichment, and empowerment" ideas are really important for us and our future skill sets. We don't know how to do any of these really well, imo, (but especially the enrichment part) and we need to learn more techniques and strategies for interacting with our users in the spaces they prefer. Whether these user needs are the result of nature or nurture, we are going to have to pay attention to them if we want to continue to be of value.

Summarizes and links to "Faculty Survey 2009: Key Strategic Insights for Libraries, Publishers, and Societies."

Excerpt: "Increasingly, in the scientific disciplines, information ranging from online journals to databases must be recent to be relevant, so Wideners collection of books, its miles of stacks, can appear museum-like. Likewise, Googles massive project to digitize all the books in the world will, by some accounts, cause research libraries to fade to irrelevance as mere warehouses for printed material. The skills that librarians have traditionally possessed seem devalued by the power of online search, and less sexy than a Google query launched from a mobile platform."

If you are rushed for time and can't read all the articles, be sure to read this one.

More about the future that is heading our way...

This article reminded me of a visit to Jefferson, Texas which used to be a major hub in Texas until its citizens turned down a connection to the railroad. Publishers need to plan for a digital future to prevent their own extinction. This article is a good start for getting them to think about what that future might look like.

As research library leaders confront turbulent times, they sorely need new tools to facilitate thinking about the future of the institution and to foster dialogue within the community. ARL's new project seeks to envision library futures and will engage the Association's member community in looking decades out at the situations that will confront research libraries. At the heart of this work will be the creation of a set of future scenarios and a toolkit to facilitate research library leaders in their planning and decision making.

It will be interesting to see in twenty years if any of the scenarios pan out. Would someone doing scenarios twenty years ago have predicted just how digital today's libraries are?

Broader than I expected with opportunities for law and museum librarians.