Family Man Librarian

Now that I have a child who is a freshman in high school, the whole debate about “what future college students will expect from libraries” has become a lot more real to me. For instance, Keegan loves video games; always has. (Unfortunately for him, I hate video games; always have and probably always will. I’ve made a few half-hearted attempts to meet him on his ground when it comes to this passion and have failed miserably.) Fortunately, he has also developed a strong love of reading and books, although he has a built-in antipathy for libraries, preferring instead to browse around at a nearby Borders. Go figure, with a father who is a librarian.

More recently it came to my attention that his school actively uses Turnitin, one of the more popular anti-plagiarism commercial services out there. Keegan is required to submit his papers to this service as part of his class work. I reacted pretty negatively to this news, quite frankly. He couldn’t understand why. He thought of it as no big deal, and generally a “good thing.” I tried to explain my reasons for not liking such a service but I don’t think it really sunk in that much with him.

One more sign of the times as far as Keegan is concerned is that he is allowed, by some teachers at least, to turn in papers from home via the Internet. This allowance in turn means that he is given more time to work on his papers if, e.g., the teacher says it has to be turned in by midnight of a certain day. Michele and I both feel somewhat negatively about this but then I realized, hey, this is exactly what I expect and allow students in my course to do — the only difference is that they are graduate students and are supposed to be more responsible and independent than the typical high school freshman.

I’m not sure what all of this means in terms of libraries and how they should plan to serve the needs of students, but I find it interesting that I get to experience some of these things first-hand.