I attended a Cybertour on Connecting with the Millennium Generation, led by Mary Ellen Bates, of Bates Information Services. This talk was a 15-minute presention on how the “digital generation” sees information. It was fascinating. Mary Ellen discussed the fact that the “digital generation” doesn’t e-mail and sees websites that aren’t collaborative as both boring and useless. For them, Facebook is the web, so if you want them to see it, you’d better put a link on Facebook. Moreover, if they don’t find the information they want with a certain tool, they blame the tool and go somewhere else, rather than seeking training. Also, they believe in their own ability to evaluate information and to determine what is authoritative.
Mary Ellen then offered several ways to lure millennials into the “Info Lab” (her new term for library, since it connotes activity). She suggested acknowledging the user’s expertise – do not phrase it as trying to teach them, but instead focus on the collaboration (e.g. offer “here is what other people have tried”) and accept that they learn by trial and error. I was particularly intrigued by the advice to sneak information to millennials, much as the speakers yesterday suggested sneaking Web 2.0 tools by staff members. I took from that that no one likes condescension and people respond best to being involved in learning and trying new things, rather than being told how to do something. Pardon the digression, but Mary Ellen did emphasize encouraging self-learning, as well as peer-to-peer learning.
Other specific recommendations were comment-enabled OPACs, becoming Amazon.com like (in offering the “people who bought this book also bought . . .”), internal wikis, mashup tools, and personalization.
She closed the talk with the following points: 1) If it isn’t interactive, it’s ignored. 2) Listen, don’t tell. 3) Brands change, but trends don’t. (i.e. it’s valuable to learn the latest tools, even if they don’t last, because we need to stay on the curve of changing ways of thinking about information). 4) Focus on what you are offering them.
I was particularly interested in the focus on how the specific tool is less important than the connection with patrons, millennials or no.