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The New York Times ran an article last week on the changing face of literacy in the digital age. The column focuses primarily on the habits of teenagers, college-bound students, and how the Internet is impacting their reading.

Clearly students are developing a different set of skills than they would by reading novels, but it seems odd to hear some arguing for a new assessment of abilities when you consider the material. While a typical high school book (Candid, for example) might have an average readability level of 12.8 (with some chapters spiking at 15.3), this article’s primary subject — Nadia Konyk — comments on her love of reading sites like fanfiction.net, which boasts a 6.3 Flesch-Kincaid Grade (about the same as a TV Guide).

What I find even more troubling is the fallout from the lack of challenging contextualization that comes with reading Internet sites, which results in a lack of critical thinking even when attempting to distinguish the validity of discreet pieces of information.

Web readers are persistently weak at judging whether information is trustworthy. In one study, Donald J. Leu, who researches literacy and technology at the University of Connecticut, asked 48 students to look at a spoof Web site (http://zapatopi.net/treeoctopus/) about a mythical species known as the “Pacific Northwest tree octopus.” Nearly 90 percent of them missed the joke and deemed the site a reliable source.

Despite my profession’s attempts to teach students how to judge authoritative from non-authoritative sites, the majority of students are still unable to distinguish between the two. The worst example I’ve seen recently came when a young college graduate submitted a writing sample (for a job) that included a citation from a White Supremacists’ website.†

Obviously, this is a single anecdote, though it’s something I saw regularly when I was still working as an academic librarian. In essence, the problem isn’t that students don’t read at all, it’s what and how they read that’s creating an impact on other factors, such as how they reason, think, and evaluate information.

Thanks to Kristen for pointing me to said article.

† Now couple that with “where” I work.

Even though Bale’s “Batman voice” continues to annoy me, and the two-villain-structure seemed completely unnecessary, Nolan manages to pull the threads into a fairly exciting action flick.

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The variable (X) is supposed to represent paranormal activity, but in this case it winds up being a rather weak attempt at examining faith.

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I’m sorry to say that not long ago, my personal life hit a Web 2.0 saturation point. Not because I’ve ceased to find interesting applications, but because there’s a finite limit to the number of things you can effectively maintain.

This seems to be the hidden cost that underlies Web 2.0 technology. As Dion Hinchcliffe pointed out two years ago, truly useful apps are few and far between:

Tons of new Web 2.0 startups are being released every day, I can’t even keep track of the social bookmarking sites alone (I came across three new ones yesterday, seriously). And some of the better Web 2.0 apps that are coming out are for laughably obscure vertical markets.

The biggest problem of course is that these services don’t actually talk to each other, which is kind of ironic considering that much of it is called “social” software. Even those companies who design apps to integrate with other 2.0 platforms, have yet to truly make the disparate parts communicate with one another.

For example, if you want to track you’re reading and share that with your friends, you might choose to join Goodreads. If you’re on Facebook, you could then add the Goodreads app that will pull your list of books into your profile. But if your friends are using LibraryThing, iRead, or Shelfari, then the only problem you’ve solved is displaying the results in a specific location. Facebook doesn’t allow any of these services to talk to one another, nor do any of them support a seamless interface with any of the other applications.

As Michael Hirschorn theorized last April, “the third rail of social media may ultimately come down to that most old-media of issues: ownership.” For users though, it comes down to a question of manageability: how many services can you reasonably manage before they become a liability on your time?

My profession has been grappling with this problem for years. While all of us are attempting to plug our collections into various applications in order to get the most out of our libraries, if we’re asking our patrons to join (yet another) service, how likely are they to take the offer? And at what point does every user wind up hitting their saturation point?

Bobbi Newman, at Librarian By Day, noticed a search in her logs that read: “what is a librarian’s day like?” She writes:

I’m assuming it’s someone considering becoming a Librarian and I thought what an amazing opportunity! If I post about this and get others to do it too, it will allow librarians to share amongst ourselves (our positions are changing so rapidly) and also to let the public know what we do.

I can understand her impulse, as my most frequently visited post is How To Become A Librarian. In fact, it became so popular (so quickly), that I amended my tongue-and-cheek post with a link to real information on how to become a librarian. Since my job is a fairly unique one, I thought I’d share a little about what I’m doing, in the (similar) hopes that it might inspire others to pursue this rather satisfying, if unorthodox, occupation.

I should start with the basics. I’m a research librarian in a Holocaust Museum. I previously worked in different library environments — academic and public — before moving into this specialized library, where I act as a solo librarian.†

Today involved the following:

Completed an annotated bibliography for our Teacher Education Institute
As far as I’m concerned, the bane of library work is the annotated bibliography (clunky, time consuming, static, and out-of-date by the time they’re printed). Nonetheless, almost every course that’s taught uses a guide of recommended resources which is nothing but an annotated bibliography.

Searched for material to use in a Censorship Exhibit/Program
For the first time since I moved to the museum, we’re going to be doing a program for Banned Books Week. The program — a collection of dramatic readings by local actors/performers/poets — is already well into the planning stages, but I’ve just begun pulling together the material for the exhibit, which concentrates on the destruction of books and literature during the third stage of genocide.

Cataloged a small collection of children’s books
While cataloging was never my forte, you have to expect a healthy dose of it when you’re the only librarian. I’ve found that it’s easy to manage when you fold into a workflow that has a lot of variety.

Ordered $350 worth of books
Collection development has always interested me, and it’s something I’m always eager to tackle. This was a fairly light order, but there were two titles in my “cart” that I wanted to get as soon as possible.

Fielded a half dozen reference questions
Unlike cataloging, this is my forte (Jim Carmichael would be so proud). The average day is consumed with varying amounts of research, depending on the types of requests I get, and since I have a non-typical library, I tend to get non-typical reference questions. For example, I spent a large chunk of the afternoon attempting to determine if three Communist partisans were hanged in Kaunas (Kovno) on December 12, 1941.

That was what a librarian did today. Thanks to Lauren for pointing this out.

†A librarian who works alone and is expected to perform all the tasks that larger institutions divide among different positions.