Late Introduction

By way of introduction, my name is Patrick Spurlock. I am the current Community Relations & Development Coordinator for the public library system in Valdosta, GA. In my current position I do everything from grant writing to social media, graphic design, and photography. My wife and I are both first semester MLIS students and undergraduate alumni (my B.A. is in Philosophy & Religious Studies, with a prior A.A. in Journalism & A.A.S in Computer Information Systems). In my spare time I write and record music (formerly a member of the avant garde collective known as To Live and Shave in L.A., occasionally release solo stuff, and have maintained a guitar/synth ambient-noise group with my best-mate B.P. under the name of ...Of Gods and Men {really old link} for going on a decade), hang out and watch Batman with my 4 year old daughter, experiment with macro and landscape photography, and try to keep our Weimaraner puppy Luna from destroying everything.

The purpose of this blog will be to discuss topics relative to the Library & Information Science course MLIS-7500 being taught at Valdosta State University for the Spring 2013 semester. Issues that will be addressed on this blog over the course of the semester might include media use in libraries (from audio to visual) as well as issues concerning the future of technology in libraries.

Siri: Reference Librarian of the Future?

When I first purchased an iPad at the beginning of the year I wasn't really interested in trying Siri out. My main phone in an Android phone and I am more experienced with similar features such as Google Now, but rarely use voice input.

It didn't occur to me until around the third week of this semester that technology such as predictive text, auto complete, and voice recognition could be the future of the traditional "reference desk" (or "information station"). I decided to ask Siri if she could be a reference librarian or simply a librarian. Displaying her well known "attitude problem" to me from the outset, her first answer was "I can see that as a possibility." Unfortunately, I had not yet figured out how to take a screenshot on an iPad, and repeated attempts to get the same response left me with nothing more than the "attitude" that she is known for ("I'm busy right now," "Can we change the topic," etc.).

It's scary to think that the role of a reference librarian could in the future be outsourced to an algorithm, but no one ever said that the future would necessarily be easy for everyone.