Libraries trying to reach teens  " 'They're the customers of the future,' said Penny Halle, a public services librarian at the Muskego Public Library. 'If we turn them off in seventh grade because they can't find anything here for them or they can't find a friendly face, what makes anyone think they're going to come back when they're 22?' " [via Library Stuff]

Excellent point! It's great that these libraries are implementing discussion groups, and I'm not putting down books or print in any way, but we have to be much faster to adopt other types of outreach to teens to prove to them we're still relevant in their lives (now and in the future).  If they can't reach us in ways that are natural for them, then we won't exist in their world.

The Next Generation Customer Communication Platform "In the not-too-distant future, we will begin seeing unified customer support platforms that allow companies and their customers to communicate seamlessly via the Web, telephone, and wireless devices. In this article, we will learn how two evolutionary trends are creating a new generation of unified customer communication platforms. The lines between a phone customer and a Web customer are going to blur." [at VoiceXML Planet, via WebDeveloper.com]

This illustrates my theory that in the future, libraries will have a version of the "Wal-Mart greeter" handling incoming communications, whether via email, Instant Messaging (IM), SMS, or telephone. And for a long time, that intermediary will be a human being. Most libraries have moved to automated answering systems for incoming phone calls, but that doesn't work well in the world of electronic communications (except maybe for an email autoresponder acknowledging we got your message and will respond).

We have to shift in order to communicate with our patrons in their world, not ours. We can no longer sit behind a desk waiting for a phone call.