Transliteracy, customer service and the future of

Transliteracy, Customer Service and the Future of Reference

Anthony Molaro, MBA, MLIS, PhD CandidateAssociate Dean of Library and Instructional

Services, Prairie State College

What is Literacy?

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Why is Literacy Important?

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The ability to use printed and written information to function in society, to achieve one's goals, and to develop one's knowledge and potential.

(National Assessment of Adult Literacy)

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Speak Listen

What is Transliteracy?

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The ability to read, write and interact across a range of platforms, tools and media from signing and orality through handwriting, print, TV, radio and film, to digital social networks.

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This is literacy

now

It is not about technology

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Its about connections

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Its about people being creative

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Its about helping them use their voice

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A transliterate person is someone who can engage in the flow of knowledge via any medium (whether print, oral, digital, or other) so that

they may be a fully functional citizen and participant of society.

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While transliteracy is “not the equivalent of emancipation, it is in a more limited but essential way the precondition for engaging in struggles around both relations of meaning and relations of power. To be literate is not to be free, it is to be present and active in the struggle for reclaiming one’s voice, history, and future”

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What does transliteracy have to do with customer service?

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One of the best means of making a library popular is to mingle freely with its users, and help them in every way. When this policy is pursued for a series of years in any town, a very large portion of the citizens receive answers to questions, and the conviction spreads through the community that the library is an institution of such beneficent influences that it can not be dispensed with.

-Samuel Swett Green (1876).

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Where are your library customers, patrons, users, members?

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We’ve all dealt with the automated phone system.

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How do we go from this…

…to this?

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And what is this?

What kind of customer service is

this?

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And the Future of Reference…

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This reference is dead

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This is the future of reference

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Book clubs in the bar

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Libraries are Kitchens (Richard Kong at AHML)

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We provide them with all the tools and training to be their own producers

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“As much as our television, radios, and movie theaters would have us believe otherwise, information consumption is as active an experience as eating is; in order for us to live healthy lives, we must move our information consumption habits from the passive background of channel surfing into the foreground of conscious selection.”

- Information Diet

On Change: