Image from Wired Web site

According to Wired, the browser Netscape will cease development in February 2008.

Now doesn’t that make you feel Web-1.0-all-over?

Gosh, I remember thinking how cool Netscape was — how the little comet went around the “N” in the icon as a Web page was loading …. and loading … and loading … on my hand-me-down modem.

Even though I haven’t used Netscape in years, why does this announcement make me feel sort of nostalgic and melancholy?

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Yahoo News.Reuters is reporting that in the latest Pew Internet study, the age group with the largest percentage of library users is Generation Y, ages 18 - 30.

From the article:

More than half of Americans visited a library in the past year with many of them drawn in by the computers rather than the books, according to a survey released on Sunday.

Of the 53 percent of U.S. adults who said they visited a library in 2007, the biggest users were young adults aged 18 to 30 in the tech-loving group known as Generation Y, the survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project said …

The survey showed 62 percent of Generation Y respondents said they visited a public library in the past year, with a steady decline in usage according to age. Some 57 percent of adults aged 43 to 52 said they visited a library in 2007, followed by 46 percent of adults aged 53 to 61; 42 percent of adults aged 62 to 71; and just 32 percent of adults over 72.

“We were surprised by these findings, particularly in relation to Generation Y,” said Lee Rainie, co-author of the study and director of the Pew project. In 1996 a survey by the Benton Foundation found young adults saw libraries becoming less relevant in the future.

“Scroll forward 10 years and their younger brothers and sisters are now the most avid library users,” Rainie said.

I browsed the Pew site for the report summary.  Unlike the Reuters reporting, it focuses primarily on where people of different age groups go to find answers to specific kinds of information needs.

From the Pew-written summary:

[I]t is young adults who are the most likely to say they will use libraries in the future when they encounter problems: 40% of Gen Y said they would do that, compared with 20% of those above age 30 who say they would go to a library.

Whoa — this is a surprise, isn’t it?   Looks like the rollout of dedicated young adult spaces, staffed by librarians focused on  developing collections, spaces, and programs for young adults, has paid off.

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As the New Year approaches, I’m reminded to clean out my paper file cabinet, putting the 2007 documents in archive boxes and starting new folders for 2008.

But … I realize that I don’t think as much about digital file management.  Which is something that the Geeks.com Tech Tips email I received today (available here or on the Tech Tips blog here) brings up.

[C]ountless digital photos of family and friends have been snapped over the course of the last week or two. What if you lost all of those photos? What if 20 years from now you lost every digital photo you had taken over the course of the last two decades? …

Not lost in the classic sense, but lost in the sense that my children and my grandchildren may not be able to look back on the history of our family during this time, because as a generation, we are in a transitional state of technology where our ability to manage and store data has not kept up with out ability to produce it.

Sure, I do periodic backups, but I haven’t spent much time thinking about how to preserve things like photos for the long-term.   While my photos of my niece and nephew are precious to me now, will those photos be accessible for the next generation? Will updated technology still be able to interpret today’s JPEG files stored on today’s CDs?  (I carried around my undergraduate floppy disks — yes, some 5-1/4″ ones, not just the square ones! — for nearly 15 years post-graduation before dumping them and their obsolete contents.)

Just a word about my personal affinity for Geeks.com.  It has a lot of closeout technology tools — good if you need a lot of mp3 players for school and it’s OK if they’re a year or two old.  And also a great model for us.

Instead of just selling technology stuff, they create added value by publishing weekly articles.  Tips for podcasting, choosing a digital camera, and more are written with accessible language that make their customers smarter and savvier.  Much as we can do as school library media specialists: we don’t just provide services and a collection.  We can add value when we keep our staffs updated with how those collections and services can be used.

Another interesting thought for consideration … I get the Tech Tips by email and have often referred friends to the Web version.  But now they offer their articles in a third format — a blog.  I like that they are reaching people in a variety of ways, depending on their customers’ personal preference.

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