Wednesday, December 26, 2007

Library 2.0

Reactions to the Library 2.0 articles:

Reliance on user education: I totally agree about the need for federated searching and making our services easier to use. People should not have to jump through hoops to access our resources, actually their resources - their tax money is paying for it, after all.

The “just in case” collection:
I think this idea might be relevant in the middle to far future. For right now, I’m not sure but that it’s just unrealistic. I certainly have lots of questions about it. I don’t think there’s enough available in digital format yet to meet patrons’ needs, and ILL is still too slow to fulfill instant gratification. Where is he planning to get his great “everything” collection from? Are there enough databases and digital collections out there to satisfy a major university library’s mission? There certainly aren’t to fulfill our mission. We could never get away with going all digital. I don’t even know that I agree with his basic premise that current collection development methods are wasteful; one of the lovely things about libraries is serendipity. Also, how do you decide if a book is a waste of space; if it’s only used once? Twice? Three times? What’s the magic threshold?

Library 1.0: Commodity: Libraries have rarely been about the books; they’ve always been about the content. The books and other formats were important, and procedures and rituals were built up around them, because they were/are the purveyors of content.

I'm not sure what form Library 2.0 will take. I do think we need to not get mislead by the similarity of the name to Web 2.0, and remember that it's not about the technology, it's about our patrons and our mission. If we can use technology to better serve both of these, then fabulous. But sometimes it requires the human touch, and technology just gets in the way. Use technology to implement the solution, not to be the solution.

I can also say that librarianship will always be about what it's always been about: people and content and acting as a bridge/facilitator between the two.

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