Category Archives: Services

Tech Adoption Climbs Among Older Adults

Detail view of class of Senior Citizens write Wikipedia in MLP, 2014-11-04
From the Pew Research Center

Roughly two-thirds of those age 65 and older go online and a record share now own smartphones – although many seniors remain relatively divorced from digital life

A record 46 million seniors live in the United States today, and older Americans – those age 65 and older – now account for 15% of the overall U.S. population. By 2050, 22% of Americans will be 65 and older, according to U.S. Census Bureau projections.1

At the same time America is graying, recent Pew Research Center surveys find that seniors are also moving towards more digitally connected lives. Around four-in-ten (42%) adults ages 65 and older now report owning smartphones, up from just 18% in 2013. Internet use and home broadband adoption among this group have also risen substantially. Today, 67% of seniors use the internet – a 55-percentage-point increase in just under two decades. And for the first time, half of older Americans now have broadband at home.

Yet despite these gains, many seniors remain largely disconnected from the digital revolution. One-third of adults ages 65 and older say they never use the internet, and roughly half (49%) say they do not have home broadband services. Meanwhile, even with their recent gains, the proportion of seniors who say they own smartphones is 42 percentage points lower than those ages 18 to 64.

And as is true for the population as a whole, there are also substantial differences in technology adoption within the older adult population based on factors such as age, household income and educational attainment.

Seniors ages 65 to 69 are about twice as likely as those ages 80 and older to say they ever go online (82% vs. 44%) or have broadband at home (66% vs. 28%), and they are roughly four times as likely to say they own smartphones (59% vs. 17%).

Adoption rates also vary greatly by household income. Fully 87% of seniors living in households earning $75,000 or more a year say they have home broadband, compared with just 27% of seniors whose annual household income is below $30,000. Educational differences follow a similar pattern, with college graduates adopting technology at much higher rates than seniors with lower levels of formal education.

These younger, relatively affluent and/or highly educated seniors are helping to drive much of the recent growth in technology adoption among the older population as a whole. For example, smartphone ownership among seniors whose annual household income is $75,000 or more increased by 39 percentage points since 2013 – 15 points higher than the growth reported among seniors overall.

It also remains the case that older adults face unique barriers to using and adopting new technologies. Some 34% of older internet users say they have little to no confidence in their ability to use electronic devices to perform online tasks, while 48% of seniors say that this statement describes them very well: “When I get a new electronic device, I usually need someone else to set it up or show me how to use it.”

Still, older Americans who use the internet tend to view technology in a positive light and incorporate digital technology into their everyday lives. Fully 58% of adults ages 65 and older say technology has had a mostly positive impact on society, while roughly three-quarters of internet-using seniors say they go online on a daily basis – and nearly one-in-ten go online almost constantly.

(Read the rest of this article here!)

 

Question: Digital preservation: fixity checks/virus scans

Two women operating ENIAC (U.S. Army Photo)

We are passing on a request for help that you might also have; and a few answers sent in to help. If you have other suggestions, please post them to the comments!

“I’m the archivist and part of a digital preservation team at a small Catholic academic library.  We have about 1500 full-time students.  Some colleagues and I attended a Digital POWRR preservation workshop last year (which I highly recommend if it makes its way to your area).  As part of our action plan to strengthen our digital file preservation methods and storage capabilities, we’re wondering what software/tools other similarly-sized academic libraries/archives are using for fixity checks and virus scans.

We learned about some tools at the workshop, but we’re not sure what’s best for our particular situation, and our campus IT department wants us to research what other benchmark institutions are using.  We are NOT looking for a complete software package that includes hosting our files.  Our files are hosted on the university server and will soon be backed up to cloud service.  We just need recommendations for fixity checks and virus scans.

If anyone is doing something similar, can you tell me more about what products you are using for fixity checks and virus scans, and if you recommend them?  Is there a one-time cost to implement the tools or do we need to allocate money annually for digital preservation?

Anything else you would like to share about digital preservation, including written preservation plans, would also be helpful.

Thank you in advance!

Catherine

Continue reading Question: Digital preservation: fixity checks/virus scans

Messages of Inclusion: A grassroots campaign for turbulent times

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(From American Libraries magazine, by )

“Jody Gray witnessed a “barrage of tragedy” within her first year as director of the American Library Association’s (ALA) Office for Diversity, Literacy, and Outreach Services (ODLOS)—from the Pulse nightclub murders in Orlando, Florida, to the Dallas police shootings.

“Libraries were suddenly in the middle of everything,” Gray says. Libraries have long offered their patrons inclusive, safe places to go, she says, but increasingly “they were doing it in crisis.”

Nationally, librarians looked to ALA for leadership. When Gray received calls from people seeking advice on how to deal with trauma and discrimination, she privately connected them with colleagues who faced similar issues in their own communities. But Gray started thinking: “There’s got to be a way for people to communicate to each other what they’re doing in these times of crisis that doesn’t have to be vetted [by ALA]. It could be flexible, on the ground, and offer a space for librarians to share directly with each other.” Continue reading Messages of Inclusion: A grassroots campaign for turbulent times

Question: seeking a free alternative to Microsoft Access

Microsoft Office 2013 logo and wordmark

We are passing on a question from a library person, and a couple of potential suggestions. If you have other suggestions, please share them in the comments!

“We are looking for a free alternative to Microsoft Access. We have looked at Base which is part of LibreOffice and OpenOffice. However, as far as we can determine, Base does not allow us to import a CSV file into the database as a table. Such a feature would be important to us as we frequently need to import text files.

We would like to be able to query the database using SQL.

Microsoft Access supports Visual Basic Application. We would like a database that works with C#, Java or JavaScript in the same way, but I realize this may be expecting too much.

I would appreciate any advice.”

Continue reading Question: seeking a free alternative to Microsoft Access

Library Futures Task Force explores options for future

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(From the News Review,  by )

“The Sage Library System could offer Douglas County libraries a catalog system as well as courier service to share 1.7 million books with other Oregon libraries. Sage is a consortium with 77 member libraries in 15 Eastern Oregon counties.

Beth Longwell, systems manager for Sage, told the Douglas County Library Futures Task Force Friday that the cost for all Douglas County branches to join the system would be about $40,000 a year. Sage wouldn’t be involved in staffing or operations of the libraries themselves.

Joining Sage is one of many possibilities the task force is looking into as it ponders possible long-term solutions to restore a countywide library system. The county government, struggling with the loss of federal timber money, has announced it will pull funding for the library system at the end of this fiscal year. Most smaller library branches are already closed, and the Roseburg branch is slated to close at the end of this month.

Continue reading Library Futures Task Force explores options for future