I read through most of the publication and found it to be much of what I already knew or thought. The section on library directors showed them more into the social networking than I thought. I laughed at how many email addresses directors seemed to have.

I may be off base here but social networking to your own community seems kind of counter productive. Social networking with teens and having a "local" group or club with events can be fun, but in reality it is just another way to reach out to teens in your area.

The glory of the Internet has always been to find others with like interests; railroad and car buffs discovered this early on. To find a connection to your passion in someone else is what the World Wide Web is all about.

Keeping your social networking local just does not make sense to me. I struggle with the concept because many of the local avenues for social events have always been there.

Possibly, libraries are reaching too far in this or maybe they too need to discover their unique niche in the www and draw from the more global audience.

This is a very interesting report and I am glad that you included some age related data. For example, the report gives the "Reasons for Creating a Web Page", broken down by age.

However, There is a graph of "Online Activities by Total General Public" on page 1-7, but no breakdown by age for these activities. I think that it would be great to add tables or graphs for "Online Activities" broken down by age. Please consider posting a table with this data for the 50+ demographic (or providing access to the raw data).

I am interested in how older adults are using the internet and how libraries can serve this demographic.

Thank you for your comments. I am from the market research department at OCLC and we are happy to hear you find the report useful in helping you better serve your patrons, specifically by age.

The following link will direct you to a chart detailing Online Activities by age http://www.oclc.org/reports/pdfs/sharing_onlineactivitiesbyage.pdf

More than half of the respondents 50+ have used a search engine, browsed/purchased items and books online, used an online banking site, and have sent or received an e-mail during the last 12 months. Except for the usage of online dating sites and business-related social sites, the 50+ age group was less likely than respondents ages 14/15 - 21 and 22 - 49 to have participated in interacting activities (e.g., social networking, instant messaging, etc.) and creating activities (e.g., usage of social media sites, creating a Web page, etc.) during the last 12 months.

I hope this helps!

Thank you very much for posting the additional graph of "Online Activities by Age". I do find this information very helpful and have posted about it on my Senior Friendly Libraries blog.

Many thanks for this report - I found it fascinating reading.

I have written a blog post in which I highlight aspects of the report which are of particular interest to me, in the UK.

Brian Kelly, UKOLN

Thanks Joanne,

I always look forward to OCLC's annual report, and this one is telling. I'm pretty surprised that this year OCLC might not have chosen to take the Harris approach and attempt to be Interactive. http://www.harrisinteractive.com/partner/hpolpanel.asp

It's a problem. Getting feedback from users via a third party's inquiries will lead an org like Harris to institute the beginnings of a new culture, based around interactive global groups or panels, while leaving a client's management to believe "... moving toward a single product strategy & single web presence, which will consolidate all current (OCLC) web sites around the globe" is in any way progressive.

I'm also very surprised that OCLC didn't compare between the old (broadcast) approach to building an online library (e.g. http://www.worlddigitallibrary.org/project/english/video.html) and the new (interactive) ways (E.g Wikipedia). Culturally, our users' ideas about .orgs and their digital libraries are on such very diverse global (media) evolutions. One size or strategy is so obviously not going to fit all.

Thanks so much for the quote from Frank Kilgour; “To continue to be vital to society, libraries must adopt new objectives. In particular, they must strive to participate with individuals in their cultural activities; passive, depersonalized service is no longer enough.” It must be pretty scary for every library to know less than 7% of users will their 'Share their ideas with library staff about services'.

So when can we expect OCLC might begin to adopt some new objectives? And more active, personalized (interactive and diverse) services?

Or should we simply wait until next year's report from Harris?