Week 6 #15

Library 2.0....

I must admit that I did find some of the articles interesting. Some were obviously too full of themselves. Nattering on and on about metadata when the only people who care about metadata are behind the scenes. People don't care who what where when or why they get what they want. They only know that they want what they want when they want it, which is usually immediately!
I enjoyed the article by Dr. Wendy Schultz. I found her concept of what a library is to be a really nice way of looking at it. Do I necessarily agree with her? No I can't say that I do. But I do like the ideas of what the libraries of the past and librarians of the past were. It is put into some nicely romanticized language.

I also like the Librarian 2.0 Manifesto. It is a good mantra. Maybe a good screen background. Always staring at you....you will never forget the dictates of what is is to work in the library nowadays.


I also really liked the icebergs article. I agreed with the author about the "just in case" collections. As librarians and library workers it is sometimes difficult to let go of the books. Even though I do tend to do *everything* on computers anyways, it is still sometimes a difficulty to "let go" or get rid of some of the books. It almost feels like getting rid of the tangible item itself will get rid of all the information. Which is of course ridiculous. But it is the emotional entanglement that we may find ourselves in. However, I do not know if the author has a real grasp on his second concept, "user education". Obviously we need to focus on teaching the public the basic concepts of searching first and not necessarily the hoopla and hangups of the more difficult search engines. And I appreciate that he realizes that the ratio of people to library staff is grossly disproportionate because there is no way for the staff at our libraries to actually teach the patron how to use the computers. However, when he talks about easy one button commands and how it is always going to be the fault of the services and not the patron....I don't think that he realizes just how computer-illiterate some people are. One button commands aren't going to do anything for the person who barely understands how to get onto the internet in the first place....Nor is it going to help the people who think they know what they are doing when they really don't!

All in all library 2.0 works for me. More computer technology is something that I am okay with.
And hopefully peoples opinions of the library will begin to change as they open their eyes to the fact that we (libraries) have evolved.