The Academic Library and the Net Gen Student: Making the Connections (review)

How viable are academic libraries in this new millennium? Will the Net Generation (sometimes referred to as Millennials or Generation Y) still find the academic library and the services it provides relevant in light of the lifestyle-changing technologies that have consumed this generation? Susan Gibbons’ book addresses these concerns and provides a practical guide for academic librarians that she maintains will help them ride this technology wave and be as vibrant and pertinent to Net Gen students as they need to be.

Gibbons is no stranger to tackling the needs of undergraduate students. Her book, Studying Students: the Undergraduate Research Project at the University of Rochester (Chicago: ACRL, 2007), co-edited by anthropologist Nancy Fried Foster, applied ethnographic techniques to understanding the University’s undergraduate students and their use of information. Her current position as Dean of Public Services and Collection Development at the University of Rochester library as well as her previous position as Director of Digital Initiatives for the University of Rochester’s River Campus Libraries, puts her in a unique position to explore the changing technological landscape facing academic libraries today and how this impacts library public services, especially with regard to the Net Generation.

Using organizational business theories, Gibbons identifies the new technologies invading the academic library world as “disruptive technologies,” which have forever transformed or altered a product or service, and align with what consumers are looking for – convenience and low cost. Ignoring disruptive technologies (such as travel agents transitioning to online travel sites, and film-based photography to digital) will cause businesses to fail. Similarly, academic libraries that refuse to acknowledge and learn from the convenient and free disruptive technologies that the Net Generation consumes (online games, social networking, sharing sites, mobile communication devices) will inevitably be rendered irrelevant.

The Net Generation is not only our current crop of undergraduates, but our future graduate students and faculty. Gibbons argues that understanding and embracing them now, instead of merely acknowledging that they are different or that they exist, will help us in the long run. Citing various studies, Gibbons paints Net Generation students to be team-oriented, sociable, skilled multi-taskers, who crave or desire instant gratification, and personalized, customized user experiences. Gibbons has devoted a whole chapter to these attributes, reinforced by, or present in, the online games Net Gens play. These students are the first generation of digital natives, as opposed to previous generations of digital immigrants, who had, at some point, used or seen analog technology at work. Adapting technologies such as Web 2.0 applications (RSS feeds, blogs, Wikis), social bookmarking tools (delicious, tags) and communication devices (IM, texting, Facebook) – Gibbons devotes a chapter to each section – to libraries’ online services and resources will improve the library’s relevance with Net Gen students.

Though the Web 2.0 technologies mentioned above now appear dated (and Gibbons is the first to acknowledge this, stating that such is the current technological landscape where everything is in constant flux), the message that academic libraries need to be continually adapting and changing is clear. Some may argue that this is mere common sense and that any entity or organization that does not keep up with the times in some shape or form will end in failure. Gibbons does recognize this (she models her premise on organizational business theories, after all) but she brings home the point that libraries and librarians may have a harder time adapting due to their reluctance to relinquish control of library practices learned and developed over many years that have defined librarianship. For example, Gibbons correctly states that the inflexible Subject Terms or controlled vocabulary used in the library’s OPAC record is perplexing for most users, particularly Net Gen students who are accustomed to tags and links that direct them to related items or most popular items (a feature pioneered by Amazon.com). Now, four years after the publication of her book, such features are...