Revenge of the Twopointonians

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Despite what the Annoyed Librarian says (love her), the library landscape, 2.0 manifesto and all, has changed, whether you're a Twopointonian (her words, not mine) or not.

Case in point: Tonight I was teaching my very favorite class, CAS 602, otherwise known as the collective of new CAS graduate students and fixed term instructors. You could not ask for more enthusiastic audience each year, and they are always willing to put up with my whims and conversational digressions.

I only teach this class once a year, and each session is a snapshot of the current state of my library instruction. I swear, I never plan it that way. I remember when I first began teaching the class, it was very traditional---sample searches in seminal databases, important library web pages for their disciplines, etc...

In 2005, I began incorporating Google Scholar and Citation Linker into the discussion. The class moved away from a focus on static resources, and more into an exploration of manipulating freely available tools to find the information that you need.

This year, when I found myself in the middle of a detailed (and unplanned) show and tell on how to pull RSS feeds out of Ebsco databases, I realized how much the landscape we work in has changed yet again. We talked about the VPN, about the footnoting features in Word 2007, and about using Google Reader to pull content out of article databases. None of this was planned, and what struck me most was how much our territory has now extended into IT-land.

This class also highlighted how much 2.0 innovations are resonating with our users. The flow of our class discussion went toward things like RSS---I didn't guide it there. Like it or not, Annoyed Librarian, the Twopointonians are not the sole cheerleaders of this revolution----our users are actively participating in it too.

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