I look upon my experiences in technology initiatives as retrospective journeys with a forward movement. My name is Renu Barrett and I work as an Archivist. It was in 1994 that I volunteered to construct the divisional web page. I worked in Windows 3.1 until 1998 and used HTML codes directly onto to the mainframe university computer to add content. I would use the Pico editor and corrrect in Unix. Guidelines were sketchy, but I saw it as a challenge and a change in the way we were doing things. Getting Dreamweaver revolutionalized the web page as did working in Windows 95. I have to say that we were slow in implementing changes to our technological environment compared to other departments, as we were not considered a priority.
Now that the staff is informed and equally represented in intiatives such as Library 2.0, I am excited to learn the newer trends in technological advancements. I have always been interested in technology and have been quite immersed in it at home. I give Ryan my son credit for this He was involved in several McMaster projects and would always take delight in showing me things like Flash and WebCT projects which he created. My own questions were always answered with expertise and he would want to discuss topics like databases after work. Ryan also got me interested in gadgets such as PDAs and I found that I was totally connected even at airports. When I recently told him about Libary 2.0 and that I would be learning to write a blog, use Facebook etc, he thought that it was about time. So I am comfortable to embrace new technology as it comes… I wonder if we are going to see gaming interfaces used for navigation on any library pages. The transformation journey has just begun.
