Comments on: Library 2.0: An open call

By: walt

walt — Sat, 07 Jan 2006 02:12:46 +0000

[For the record: Five p.m. ~~Monday~~Friday is now past. I've added comments from here, others received on my own gmail address, and others received through other means to what's now a 24,000 word essay, which I might be able to cut to, oh, 22,000 words. Watch for a new issue next week, with some three dozen voices heard regarding "Library 2.0."] Update Monday, where my brain was Friday: The special issue is out.

By: walt

walt — Thu, 05 Jan 2006 15:34:08 +0000

Hi Tom,

Whew. I may very well add some paragraphs from that to the T. Scott comments I already have in the draft essay…it’s considerably more forceful. (I’d probably pick it up anyway, since you’re on my Bloglines list, but thanks for the explicit pointer!)

By: T. Scott

T. Scott — Thu, 05 Jan 2006 13:33:53 +0000

I just put up a post that is far longer than your word limit, but if any of it is useful to you, feel free. (T. Scott Plutchak, Director, UAB Lister Hill Library).
http://tscott.typepad.com/tsp/2006/01/why_i_dislike_t.html

By: walt

walt — Wed, 04 Jan 2006 15:25:22 +0000

Thanks both. Don’t know that I’ll use all of each comment (and there are no live links in C&I), but I’ll consider them and any more that arrive by Friday afternoon.

(Brian: In this case, I didn’t know whether you wanted your last name used…and wouldn’t have gotten around to retrieving it from LL until the weekend. I’m lazy, you know. Anyway, thanks. As for the biblioblogosphere piece…that seems like a lifetime ago.)

By: Steve Lawson

Steve Lawson — Wed, 04 Jan 2006 05:49:42 +0000

Walt,

Feel free to use this comment in C&I if you like. One of these days I’ll write something substantial about Library 2.0 on my own blog, bt for now, I seem to just be leaving comments on others’. It’s not clear to me if I can put anchor tags in my comment, so links are at the end.

-Steve Lawson

I believe that Library 2.0 is most recognizable (and useful) as an attempt to bring libraries’ electronic services up to par with what people expect in a Web 2.0 environment. Look at the “Core Competencies” and “Design Patterns” of Web 2.0 in Tim O’Reilly’s article “What is Web 2.0″ and think about library examples:

“Cooperate, Don’t Control”: patrons hacking together AIM bot searches of the catalog (Edward Vielmetti); third parties getting RSS feeds for patron records (Library Elf); stable URLs for catalog records (Open WorldCat).

“Harnessing Collective Intelligence”: blogs (with comments enabled) as the library home page (AADL and several others); user reviews in the catalog (Open WorldCat); exploring the use of user-added tags in the catalog (no live examples that I know of).

Embracing the “perpetual beta” by adding features and services as soon as they become practical, and not waiting for a “monolithic release.”

I am sympathetic to those, like Michael Stephens and company, who argue for non-technology applications of these patterns, but I find it much harder to draw clear L2/non-L2 distinctions off the Web.

Links:
O’Reilly: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html
Vielmetti: http://vielmetti.typepad.com/vacuum/2005/12/a_design_for_a_.html
Library Elf: http://www.libraryelf.com/
AADL: http://aadl.org/
Michael Stevens and company: http://tametheweb.com/2006/01/defining_library_20_ii_is_it_m.html

By: Brian Smith

Brian Smith — Wed, 04 Jan 2006 02:03:22 +0000

My bad. First-name-only in comments is habit. Also, you *had* my last name when you put my blog in your Stupendous Sixty!

By: walt

walt — Tue, 03 Jan 2006 16:31:28 +0000

Brian,

Thanks. An interesting comment…

“Feel free to use” is all I need–and, for that matter, I assume that the CC license for the blog covers the comments as well. You want to provide a last name, or shall I just use “Brian” and note your blog’s name?

By: Brian

Brian — Tue, 03 Jan 2006 15:04:11 +0000

Didn’t Library 2.0 really happen decades ago, when libraries started buying the books that people wanted to read, in addition to “books that are good for you”? As far as I can tell, that’s what the Library 2.0 boils down to: being user-driven, saving the user’s time. Not exactly new ideas.

“Library 2.0″ is just a faddish catchphrase. Ignore it, because it’ll be gone in 6 months. The only things labeled “2.0″ with which library folks need to be concerned are pencils. And maybe RSS feeds.

(Feel free to use in C&I. Do I need to hunt down an appropriate CC license for this comment?)