Librarians in general were called out recently for not having widespread knowledge of IoT. The irony of this event was that it happened mere days after being asked for examples of people unintentionally being made to look stupid in public. QED, I suppose.
Remember that everyone has a domain in which they are knowledgeable, and we should not only respect that, but also recognize that when any of us stray into an area in which we are not (yet) knowledgeable, we are going to feel like kindergartners in a calculus class. It is far better to find a common frame of reference and work forward from that point.
I suspect that many may already be aware of the concept of IoT, without being aware of that term. Since it is currently a very nascent technology, I would assert that it is still in the early adopter phase, and has not yet fully come into the common vernacular, so it is unrealistic at this point to have an expectation that everyone should be intimately familiar with IoT concepts. Depending on the subject area you work with, you might be more familiar the term "Wearable", "Implantable devices", "Ingestible devices", "Medical Monitor", "Smart Home/House/Car/Street/Appliance", "Connected Device", etc.
No one says "I’m IoT-ifying my house" — of course not, they say "I’m making my home a smart house" because that’s the terminology that is used in that corner of the IoT market. Do you hear people boasting of the IoT on their wrist? No, they show off their "Smart Watch". Do they cook meals in an IoT? No they use a "Smart crock pot". (The very concept of the internet connected crock pot still makes me chuckle. I can’t wait until I can finally realize my dream of connecting to my toaster via telnet. I wonder if it will have a camera to watch the toast brown?)
I would expect that librarians working at sites with maker spaces would be much more likely to be aware of the IoT concept, because that demographic is going to be at or near the leading edge of technical adoption, and patrons using 3D printers are the ones I would expect to say "Hey, can I put a computer in this thing I just printed?". Other sites, especially those light in physical holdings and heavy in online resources, would not have an immediate need to care about IoT yet, other than helping researchers know where to look to find resources on that topic.
This meshes nicely with a talk that I heard Tim O'Reilly give once: when an industry is disrupted, new value is found by moving either up or down the technology stack. The example he cited was when computers became commodities, new value was found by moving up (Microsoft into operating systems) or down (Intel into chips). Applying this concept to librarianship, the choice is to broaden into areas like maker spaces, or to specialize even deeper into specialized subject areas to still provide value. Both approaches require compromises: wide and shallow, or narrow and deep?
This meshes nicely with a talk that I heard Tim O'Reilly give once: when an industry is disrupted, new value is found by moving either up or down the technology stack. The example he cited was when computers became commodities, new value was found by moving up (Microsoft into operating systems) or down (Intel into chips). Applying this concept to librarianship, the choice is to broaden into areas like maker spaces, or to specialize even deeper into specialized subject areas to still provide value. Both approaches require compromises: wide and shallow, or narrow and deep?
Even looking a few years into the future when IoT technologies are ubiquitous, I doubt IoT will ever be the dominant term used. We don't Short Message Service our friends, we text them. We don't apply Huffman coding to a string of binary data, we compress a file.
You don’t Thing-ify your Internet, you buy smart stuff.
