Presentation Tools - Libraries in the Digital Age

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Rethinking the Library: How Libraries Use Digital Tools and Technology in the Digital Age

By Amber Scroggy

    Libraries have evolved, they are institutions that are adapting to the Digital Age through the use of various digital tools designed to curate, catalogue, share, and circulate multiple forms of mass media. 
    What? Oh yeah, I said mass media. In order to get to the digital age, there had to be a need for communication and a tool to present it. The beginnings of mass media started when humans began drawing and writing on walls in caves and on stone. Let’s take a look at a timeline of the tools used since those distant ancestors I previously mentioned:

During the Pre-Industrial Age, the first printing press was invented. During the Industrial Age the telegraph, typewriter, telephone, camera, record player, and radio were all invented, all necessary to the Golden Age of television, radio, and cinema. Between 1930 and 1990 was the Electronic Age when Cable TV, FM Radio, cassette tapes, VCR, the first email, cellular phone, and personal computers emerged along with their operating systems, and various programs for those computers. However, the end of the 20th Century and the start of the 21st Century saw the biggest spike in the evolution of mass media, and the beginning of the Digital Age or the “Evolution of New Media” (NIMCJ, 2024). It began in 1991 with the invention of the World Wide Web (WWW) and in 1995 Microsoft’s Internet Explorer made the WWW accessible to anyone with the means to access it, (NIMCJ, 2024). 

Since 1995, the Digital Age has made leaps and bounds. It seems, that most forms of mass media have been digitized. As the world has become increasingly reliant on digital access, libraries have stepped up to make accessing the vast repositories of digital knowledge more accessible for their patrons and the librarians that support them.

    Digital Age libraries have adopted the use of technologies such as presentation tools, often cloud based, to streamline workflows, enhance collaboration, visualize data, and improve library collection management and operations (Kipps, K. L., & Jones, A. K., (2020). The article, Things Are Looking Up: Using Cloud-Based Technology Tools in Collection Management Workflows, by Kayla L. Kipps and Allison K. Jones discusses how the College of Charleston Libraries integrated various cloud-based tools for collection management workflow and highlighted the practical applications and pros and cons of cloud-based tools. A few of the tools discussed include Google Drive and Spreadsheets, Tableau Public, Microsoft Project 2000, LibGuides, Alma and Koha, EBSCO Discovery Service, Citation Management Software, Eprints, and more, (Kipps & Jones, 2020) .

    Keeping up with the times, libraries have evolved to embrace technology in an effort to enhance services which better serve the increasing community of digital users. The evolution has led to hybrid institutions that combine traditional resources, books, newspapers, magazines, and more with those same resource stored as digitized materials in various forms for use on various devices. Presentation tools have enabled libraries to continue providing vital services to the community and the means to access these new services including access to computers and other computing devices for those in the communities who would be lost to the digital divide.

Check out this TEDx Talk: Are Libraries Still Relevant? with Liz Bartlett

If you made it all the way here....

Thank you for reading!😁

References:

Kipps, K. L., & Jones, A. K. (2020). Things are looking up: Using cloud-based technology tools in collection management workflows. Serials Review, 46(3), 215–223. https://doi.org/10.1080/00987913.2020.1806646

NIMCJ. (2024, July 22). Timeline of the evolution of Mass Media. Timeline of the Evolution of Mass Media. https://www.nimcj.org/blog-detail/timeline-of-the-evolution-of-mass-media.html