I’ve been blogging with Pete a lot about Library 2.0. When I posted Amazon is Library 2.0, he countered with asking the question what is Library 2.0? Do we have any actual examples of Library 2.0? What exactly is it that we’re asking of ourselves when we talk about Library 2.0???
Library 2.0 might have started as a neologism, but, as the discussion thread for the topic on the Wikipedia states:
“Library 2.0 is as much, if not more, of an offshoot of Business 2.0 [and] has has since moved on to become something that is likely to change the way librarians think about the profession”
From all my reading lately, Library 2.0 is about librarians talking to librarians about where they want to be in the future. If it is really about Business 2.0, then hopefully, librarians are talking about innovation. If it includes Web 2.0 - the social web - then librarians should be talking about about people, and about community building, enabled through the participation that social computing brings. They should be talking about achieving this through trust and encouraging users to share ideas through writing, rating, and commenting against everything in the library’s collection, even to the extent of making the collection open to developers to use, re-use and improve!
Are librarians talking about this? Yes! - the bloggsphere is alive with this chatter. But are they walking-the-walk as well? Are they actually being innovative with their internal business? Are they being innovative with the services they offer? If so, then are they talking to users about this? Are they doing market research in order to find that niche community they can service with Web 2.0 products? Are the services they intend on delivering interesting enough for users to talk to other users about so that it spreads like wildfire in the same way social computing projects like Flickr did?
… or are libraries just playing catch-up? Rather than changing the way librarians think about the profession, shouldn’t they be changing the way others think about the profession?
Library 2.0 is a nice dream. I think it’s now time to wake up and act. I want my Library 2.0 now!
M
23 May, 2007 at 5:49 pm
Well, patience is a virtue
And perpetual beta is nice for people who have time to deal with screw-ups 
Seriously, libraries are a huge service, serving in many different fields, and changing any one of those will take time. Public libraries have to deal with a lot of politics as an example. This is not to say that librarians should sit on their hands, but rather that it is not as simple as all that.
A curious notion is that we will never sell L2 because if we did wide enough research we’d find that most library users don’t use the library in ways that would benefit from L2 concepts. It is for the future possible users we’re building L2, and who knows what they want
23 May, 2007 at 9:02 pm
There are some good people taking up the Library 2.0 initiative (I wrote a recent post about it). One of the most proactive is this one from the US[http://plcmclearning.blogspot.com/].
24 May, 2007 at 9:35 pm
Pete do you have Matt Hodgson’s email addy handy?
I’m trying to contact him re trying to get a wider audience for a couple of his blog posts:
What is Library 2.0?
and
The Taxonomy of Social Computing
Please either forward this note or just ping me his addy, whichever works best for you.
Thank u sir!
Jeremy
Jeremy Geelan
Founder & Publisher, Social Computing Magazine
http://socialcomputingmagazine.com
26 May, 2007 at 7:54 am
I agree that we seem to be only talking to each other about this. Even I have something on my effinglibrarian at blogspot page called “I can fly” that is another “we should do this” message. But I don’t think librarians are good at the business and marketing side of our profession. But if more librarians do it, then more will be visible doing it (okay, maybe not “doing it”– do you really want to see librarians “doing it”?). Librarians seem to be protective and territorial about what they do, so this openness is difficult for us; but the more we use 2.0 tech, the more comfortable we will be with collaboration and sharing. But like your article implies: are we too late?