Marshall Breeding Webinar - 9/21/10

I had the opportunity to listen to Marshall Breeding (Director for Innovative Technologies and Research for the Vanderbilt University Libraries in Nashville, TN) speak via a webinar on September 21. (offered by Minitex) He spoke about network technologies and library automation. Here's his website: http://www.librarytechnology.org/
One of the tidbits I wrote down from his presentation (and I learned a colleague of mine did as well!) was the percentage of money being spent on people to work with print materials and yet budgets are moving more towards securing electronic content. Sometimes we have difficulty letting go of past workflows that we have traditionally used with print materials.
When Marshall was talking about the OLE project - which I have heard discussed a bit over the past year or so - it really struck home this time when he emphasized this is a back-end functionality project. It is not trying to be or replicate a front-end discovery interface: http://kuali.org/ole
I did have to chuckle at one of his comments about many young students today not knowing life without the Internet. I had just had that conversation with students in an Introduction to Microcomputers class the day before. Just to marvel at how much has happened in the past 20 years in relation to the Internet and World Wide Web is amazing to me...as it was to "non-traditional" students in that class. The generation who only knew life with the web, however, wasn't as fascinated by the topic ;)