Brain Development, Learning and Librarians

Last week I heard a fascinating MPR radio program on brain development, which seems pretty true to human nature, including differences in male/female brains, and young/old brains. Apparently young brains reach a point at around 12-13 (the traditional "coming of age" in the Jewish community) where they stop adding new neural pathways and begin to prune them back. From then on, the brain concentrates on fewer circuits, making them more efficient. We make life choices, build expertise.

Peak efficiency in brains occurs in mid-life (late 40s), with some decline beginning after this. (But remember, the decline is from mid-life peak, so maybe by retirement one is back down to the efficiency levels of where you were in your 20s.) And depending on the stimuli, even older brains can still improve. This is supported by another recent study showing that older adults doing heavy internet searches had significant measurable growth in the portions of the brain responsible for cognitive processing.

Then this cartoon made me think of the impact on all of us, older and younger, of the Amazon Kindle (though which device I have sold a whole 12 copies of my e-book of poetry), and the burgeoning capacity and shrinking size of electronic storage media. With more and more print media moving to digital storage, what will the librarians of the future do, exactly?

I have a feeling that they will manage electronic databases of items that were originally in printed form, for one. Last night for a paper in NT501, I searched ATLA (hosted by EBSCO), which is a database of theological literature, including articles from scholarly peer-reviewed journals. Full-text versions of the articles were often available in .pdf form right on site, and others had links to full-text versions hosted elsewhere, so one wouldn't have to borrow the actual hard copy from a library. I would imagine in years to come, the print versions of journals will become outmoded altogether, as an analog generation dies off and a digital one takes its place. I wonder.. did librarians ever really think of themselves as database managers?

Maybe so, if that's what the card catalog was - a 3x5 paper database. I suppose that's what librarians have always been; it's only in the last 20-30 years that their database has been in electronic form.

One way or another... I plan to keep pace with them. ;)