This morning I participated in a discussion and breakfast (for scholarship winners)which was hosted by ACRL. The discussion was led by Richard Sweeney from the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) about the millennial generation (people who are born roughly between the years of 1979 - 1994) and how they will change the library to meet their needs.
I had had the privilege of having heard Mr. Sweeney talk about millennials because he was a guess speaker in my first semester at Pratt during E.Dimattea class of Information Professions (aka 651).
Sweeney preempted his discussion by handing out a survey and challenging some of the perceptions people have about millennials. Sweeney's all about taking surveys and focus groups so the discussion started out by pointing out who the millennials were in the room (minority by the way). He then went on to ask them what was the music that many of them were listening to at the moment. To the surprise of many there was no one set of genre of music that these young people were listening to but varied greatly. Sweeney pointed out that this was common as young people have more choices now with a wider variety of music.
He also pointed out through his research and the research of others that millennials communicate more than any other generation.
Some of his conclusions that the future of Academic libraries will be "Millennial Driven Library Innovation" in that these young people especially young people will define what the libraries will look for in the future.
One thing in particular that is very interesting is that millennials prefer peer-to-peer learning as opposed to online alternatives. This is very important because I think we tend to think to much about the media and not the people.
He also predicts a drastic change in scholarly communication and how it will affect the academy all together.
Those are somes of my thoughts . . . off to another session.
No comments:
Post a Comment