2007-11-19

What I think of "2.0"

Blogging at the circulation desk again. You think I would have learned.

I took a while to figure out just what I wanted to say here. That's why I'm a week behind my comrades at VBPL.

What is 2.0? It's a label applied to something that has already happened. Kind of like the phrase "Middle Ages", which was coined during the Renaissance. Incidentally, those same talking heads came up with the phrase "Renaissance", as a way of saying that classical civilization was being reborn. It wasn't, of course. Western civilization had been changed irrevocably, but I digress.

A few years back, someone said, "Hey, there are a lot of neat things you can do online these days that you couldn't before. Blogs, social networks, RSS, wikis; what these things need is a catchy label to identify them as different from the thing that came before." And so, Web 2.0 was born. And by extension, so was Web 1.0 - the old paradigm of "go to a website and click on stuff". The phrase "Web 2.0" is largely unknown even today. Ask your average person, and they've never heard of it, even if they use all of these "2.0" things. It is just another way for intellectuals and cultural elitists to segregate themselves from the masses.

Library 2.0? That's a different animal. It seems that librarians love catalogs, and categories, and labels of all kinds. So, when all this neat stuff got a name, some enterprising individuals thought it would be keen if libraries could get in on it, too. Naturally, we're a few years behind (portability is big now - if it doesn't fit in your pocket, what good is it?), but that hasn't stopped well-meaning technologists with master's degrees from trying to reshape how libraries interact with their customers. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but as an organization, we need to pick and choose specific applications for specific purposes. We need to ask, "Is this useful? How useful is it?" before jumping feet first into a given app.

Some of them make sense. Use RSS to inform patrons of upcoming events. Or even just to update the library's website. Genius! Have a profile on MySpace or Facebook and have volunteers as friends. Brilliant! Other bits are not so much. Who reads library blogs? Librarians, that's who. I don't know the stats for our pilot IM reference program, but the people I've talked to that are in it say it's pretty quiet. Speaking of stats, it would be nice to know the numbers on traffic for our existing online resources. But, I'm not on that team, so if such statistics exist, they are for me verböten. Again, I digress. Back to useful apps.

Twitter is a neat way to communicate, but 140 characters just isn't enough to convey complex messages. Nevertheless, it could still be useful for intra-department comm traffic. Who's at a meeting, or on break, or stuck in the stacks. These would also need some kind of portable device to access Twitter in order to be truly effective. Back to portability, then. I doubt the city will spring for IPhones, but a man can dream.

Wow. Much longer post than I anticipated. Perhaps it is time to wrap this up. In closing, you might want to read this post from the Annoyed Librarian. And be wary of anyone with a manifesto. Buzzwords do not equal action. What you have to look out for are armbands and flags.

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