This year’s Beloit Col­lege Mind­set List (for the class of 2011) came out yes­ter­day. I love these lists because they point out to me how much things have changed since I was a teenager. I think of myself as being some­where around the age of 24, even though I’m well more than a decade past that, so it’s help­ful for me to have reminders that my view of the world is shaped by dif­fer­ent forces than those who come after me. Log­i­cally, I know these things, but the Beloit List always brings these thoughts to the fore­front when I read facts like the following.

1. What Berlin wall?
2. They never “rolled down” a car window.
3. “Off the hook” has never had any­thing to do with a telephone.
4. Music has always been “unplugged.”
5. Most phone calls have never been private.
6. The World Wide Web has been an online tool since they were born. (I quib­ble a bit with this, but cer­tainly they’ve grown up with it.)

So this got me think­ing about what a Beloit Col­lege Mind­set List focused on libraries for the class of 2011 might include. Adding to num­bers 3, 4, and 6 above, here are a few broad strokes I came up with that we should take into con­sid­er­a­tion when re-examining our ser­vices (remem­ber­ing that these don’t apply just to cur­rent freshmen).

• Their cell phones have always let them access infor­ma­tion, not just peo­ple, wher­ever they are.
• Video games have always been a social activity.
• They have always had to nar­row down search results (rather than expand them).
• They have always used a dif­fer­ent medium to com­mu­ni­cate with their friends than with adults.
• They may never write a check. (I don’t think I need the “may,” but just in case.)
• They think of com­mu­ni­ca­tion in 160-character chunks.
• Their default expec­ta­tion is wire­less access.
• They have never started a search at an “advanced” screen.
• They store infor­ma­tion and doc­u­ments on keychains.
• They have always copied and pasted.
• “.” is pro­nounced “dot,” not “period.”

I’ve expressed all of these ideas before here and as part of my “infor­ma­tion shift­ing” pre­sen­ta­tions, and I know oth­ers have pointed these things out for years. But these behaviors/characteristics are becom­ing more and more per­va­sive every year. If you’re like me and you grad­u­ated from library school in the last cen­tury, this is a great jump­ing off point for think­ing about spe­cific behav­iors (and changes in behav­iors) that affect things like the ref­er­ence inter­view, infor­ma­tion for­ag­ing, search boxes, etc.