Week 6: Thing 15 (Web 2.0, Library 2.0 and the Future of Libraries)

"Whether we called it reading, or scholarship, or research, or study, what brought us to librarianship was the power inherent in bringing together people and ideas...But whatever it was, it took us to thinking about librarianship, about a career where we could continue to chase some of those ideas and introduce them to other people.

On the surface, what we do every day now has little to do with that original, deep impulse to connect people with ideas. We do budgets and solve personnel problems. We hope that the next level of automation will somehow go a little more smoothly than the last one did.

Let us remember what brought us here. If librarianship is the connecting of people to ideas, it doesn't matter where the ideas exist."
---GraceAnne A. DeCandido

Library 2.0 is all about changing the way that we approach library services to meet our patrons' needs so that we can still connect them to ideas, in very different ways than when we were students.

And as the authors of the Library 2.0 articles point out, it is almost a tightrope that we need to walk to keep our libraries (and library services) relevant for our patrons, i.e., students and teachers.

The buzzwords of the 21st century include access to technology (aka, the Digital Divide), privacy, security. We can print pictures of books straight from Amazon.com so that kids could search for their overdue items. Digital cameras make it easy for us to take many pictures and to erase our mistakes. And if the local newspaper makes a mistake on a student's name, one call and the web edition can be changed so that the information is recorded correctly for posterity.

The ability to connect to library colleagues through Instant Messaging and e-mail has taken away much of the isolation previously felt when one was the "only librarian" in one's school. Technology in the library has also helped our patrons to appreciate librarians and to view our libraries as more than warehouses of dusty books.

We are not the only ones in the building with tech skills anymore, although we probably learned them early-on. But regardless of where we are in our personal use of technology, we still need to have enough library related tech skills to guide our patrons through the techno-maze.

Libraries (and librarians) need to step forward to connect people with the vast amount of information that is now available through the world wide web, shared catalogs, digital formatting, and user interface, but still must evaluate each step to make sure that it is an improvement in services (vs. just using technology for technology's sake) as they continue to encourage their patrons to become lifelong learners.