#15 On Library 2.0 and Web 2.0

Today's assignment: Read some thoughts from a variety of perspectives about the impact Web 2.0 is having or will have on libraries.

Two thoughts especially speak to my experience as a librarian.

First from Rick Anderson talking about user education: "But if our services can’t be used without training, then it’s the services that need to be fixed—not our patrons. One-button commands, such as Flickr’s “Blog This,” and easy-to-use programs like Google Page Creator, offer promising models for this kind of user-centric service." We want our users to use the resources we pay for rather than the WWW, but using these resources is so much more complicated than using Google. The inexperienced freshman college student does not see the difference between what is found in Google and what is in a database. It takes time, practice, and knowledge of a field of study to begin to realize what you need to know and where you will find it. Professors and librarians insist that students use the scholarly resources, but the students only do it because we are making them do it. In reality, though, they get most of their info from the web and just throw in a few citations to required sources. We need to figure out ways to make searching the databases as easy as using Google. Federated searching is one way. But we also need to make this as easily accessible as Google by putting a search box right on the front page of the library web site.

Second, from John J. Riemer, "Adopt Web features: The features of Amazon and Google of interest to students and scholars ought to be incorporated into the services libraries make available. Libraries should welcome the submission of reviews, assignment of keywords (“tagging”), addition of scholarly commentary, and other forms of user participation." This is a scary, exciting idea - scary because it involves letting go of control over the online catalog, but exciting to think of the possibilities of community-building this could create on a campus.