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.