George F. Will

3 million iPods in 2.5 years
3 million Kindles in 2 years
3 million iPads in 80 days
3 million iPhones in 3 weeks

2001 iPod arrived. Les than 10 years later the number of employees of music stores declined from 80 000 to less than 20 000....but now folks shop online so the jobs are up at FedEx, UPS delivering what e-shoppers buy....destruction then creativity in three year blocks?

WWW killed the travel agent industry, is about to destroy Real Estate Agents, who is next??? Teachers?...I can see how technology can be used to teach more students with less teaching staff....at least at lower higher education levels...

Ian Cook, Director Research & Learning at the B.C. Human Resources Management Association was recently quoted (my paraphrasing):

...it is easy to recruit people who have a degree, but they have no business sense. They're bright, intelligent people but you can't plug them in and have them effective on day one. They need to be shaped, mentored, they need time to learn and develop skills....but the pace, change, complexity, uncertainty and ambiguity in which business is functioning right now, employers want 110% on day three. The talent pool has not changed, employer expectations have....apprenticeship and mentoring programs have been withdrawn, though they are still needed for long term grooming of productive employees.

Yup, employers want to take, they don't want to invest in their personnel assets. All the while higher ed. keeps pumping out more and more graduates, each cohort, having a lower success rate in finding meaningful employment. We focus on material waste in business, what about all the "human waste" being produced, by defective recruiting tactics?

Pre-internet it was difficult to connect job offerings with qualified candidates, so companies invested in providing students with experience to get a career under way. Today it is easy to fill most jobs that are fairly spec'd, so companies stopped giving back because it has no consequences to them. I love those job ads that list so many skill sets that nobody internal has, and it is for an entry level position.

"We want someone who can hit the ground running" is HR speak for we want to exploit someone who is vulnerable right now.

Public Domain Mark 1.0

eBrary Announcement
155,600 e-books for PDA

Amazon.com Announcement

". . . . the same forces that created Amazon’s Long Tail in the first place may continue to make it longer over time . . . . First, exposure to niche products could drive consumers to develop a taste for more niche products. Second, by gaining access to “long tail” markets to stock their products, producers could have an increased incentive to create more new niche products over time. Finally, technologies that can drive consumers to niche products — such as search tools, product reviews, product popularity information, and recommendation engines — could improve over time, and consumers could become more familiar with these tools."

Brynjolfsson, Hu & Smith Download

New Profiteering/Publishing From Amazon.com

"Kindle Singles, which are Kindle books that are in the company’s words, “twice the length of a New Yorker feature or as much as a few chapters of a typical book.” Generally, Amazon characterized Kindle Singles as 10,000 to 30,000 words (roughly 30 to 90 pages)."

Tech Crunch

scienceblogging.org

goo.gl

Here
bit.ly

Chronicle of Higher Education

I don't buy that if books vanish our civilization will suffer.

Jan Nolin writes....

"Boxism fits well with the needs of corporate actors and policy–makers. By adding a module landscape as a layer, the Internet becomes more predictable and regulated. With more transparent patterns of Internet behaviour, commercial exploitation becomes much easier. With this ideology, the chaotic and creative character of the distributed Internet is something that needs to be tame"

First Monday

Yes, this is happening.

Chronicle of Higher Education

Approval plans + overworked reference staff + consortial purchasing = homogenized collections.

It's a problem....

The more homogenized we become, the bigger takeover target we become for L.S.S.I.

I am always, and I mean always, impressed what comes out of this woman's mouth. Here is the best attack on tenure for librarians...

I like the 'start-up' imagery she used. Much food for thought. I'm all for reasonable job security, tenure not so much....

From the mindset, front line staff cost too much, comes libraries without people..

There has been a lot of hub bub about L.S.S.I. taking over the operations of more and more libraries. We have "outsourced" many municipal services, are libraries in the same group as police, fire, urban planning? or roads, garbage, parking? time will tell..but like anything I'm guessing L.S.S.I.'s purchasing power will help some libraries...