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.

Wikis

I really like the idea of making a webpage that's the front end of a wiki, like the Bull Run Public Library. There's probably a limit to what you can do with fancy extras, but what an ideal solution for a small organization without the time or the expertise to create and maintain a standard webpage. And with the free utilities out there, you can do it for very little cost. Also, it looks like a webpage and not a wiki. Minor detail I know, but....

I'm all for the concept of popularizing web publishing. That's one of the main tenants of Web 2.0 and Library 2.0 - making things very user friendly so people can be self-sufficient and do for themselves. Setting up a blog is as easy as choosing a user name and password which democratizes access to the web as a soapbox. Wikis do the same thing for websites. This is fabulous. People should not have to know HTML to have a webpage. I built a webpage using HTML once, for a class, and rebuilt a site for my first library job the same way and I have no desire to do that again.

You could do all sorts of things in libraries with a Wiki. You could have a wiki catalog with the bibliographic information uneditable but with patrons/staff (depending on who you want to contribute) able to add to that. We talked about a local history wiki that could incorporate the items in the St. Paul Collection and allow staff and the community to add their own memories.

You could do the same with the history of the library. Billie Young said that there was so much stuff that she couldn't put into her book on SPPL that she would have loved to. How fabulous if they could be in a wiki which would, practically speaking, have no limitations on space.

Podcasts

I looked through Podcast.net, Podcastalley.com, and NPR, and found good content on each. There are a lot of library podcasts, including JJHill. I also searched under Science Fiction and found book reviews, old stories, a movie a week (vidcast), author interviews, etc.

You can use Bloglines to sign up for podcasts, and play them right from Bloglines.

I signed up for Nancy Pearl's weekly review show, and Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me. I've also sent myself the links to a number of interesting sounding Science Fiction podcasts to sample before I sign up. With the NPR stuff you pretty much know what you're getting.

Melissa.