Week 6, Thing 15 - Library 2.0 Thoughts

I admit it. I am an old-fashioned girl. I still get excited by the scent of new books, by the sound of the spine gently cracking as I open the cover for the first time, by the silk of the pages as they flow under my fingertips. Books are my little bit of heaven on earth and my communion with them is tactile as well as intellectual. I have never subscribed to the belief that "Someday there will be no books because everything will be on the web." There is too much joy in curling up with a good book. Try doing that with your Kindle or your laptop. So the first thing I did with this assignment was print out the articles (forgetting that I had the issue of SLJ) and retire to my sunny bedroom to curl up in a golden puddle and read with pen in hand. Ah, bliss!

That said, I do believe that librarians need to "find new ways to bring our services to patrons." (Anderson) To me, the whole thrust of Library 2.0 seems to be about choices. If I want to have a physical book, I can get it; if I want to research on-line, I can; if I want to create new content, it's there. I also found this assignment to be strategically placed in our learning continuum. We were exposed to just the right amount of new tools and challenges to be on the verge of overload - and then we had to think about it. Clever!

I was particularly struck by Anderson's "Away from the Icebergs" and Nilges's "To More Powerful Ways to Cooperate." Anderson's statement that we need to eliminate "the barriers that exist between patrons and the information they need" seemed directed right to my elementary libraries. Our OPAC requires that students spell correctly, or get a title exactly right in order to find what they are looking for. This can be very frustrating for a little one so "if our services can't be used without training, then it's the services that need to be fixed." Of course, one of the biggest obstacles to eliminating barriers and fixing our service in the schools is the age and ability of our hardware. With that obstacle firmly in place for the time being, it becomes ever more important for us to move "into a new world of librarianship" (Stephens) to "find new ways of bringing our services to patrons." (Anderson) The delicious account that I created is a start toward bringing better service to my patrons. I want to find a way to include it on my various school web-sites (have to work with four different tech managers ...) so that students can research from home.

One of the goals of my school system has been to have a unified catalog for all twelve of our schools. The price of proprietary systems is well beyond anything we can hope for in our current fiscal climate. As I was reading Nilges's article, his idea of building new services with Web 2.0 technologies started that hamster turning the wheel in my brain. Could we possibly upload our school collections into LibraryThing and access them that way? Certainly something to investigate.

In my previous life I was a technical writer who had access to cutting edge technology and was well versed in "Project Life Cycle," you know, the business plan that takes months and months to get through and you still end up with updates. The whole idea that we must now go forward in an environment of perpetual beta testing is both exciting and scary. In an elementary school, I will need to pick and choose among the new technologies that are available without getting caught up in Stephens's "techno-lust." (Well, no chance with our budget!) But if what we are going to enable in the end is a way for our patrons to get what they need, when they need it, in the best format for that user, then there can be no down side.