…It’s quite long, so if you’d like to print it out, please read Crawford’s advice regarding printing.

It will be interesting to see how you do with penntags; I (sincerely) wish you luck with it.

Mostly, thanks for making a couple of points that needed making:
1. Libraries have been user-centered and changing for a very long time — that’s not new and it’s insulting to insist that it is.
2. It is unrealistic to expect libraries to be the best way to get all information all the time. Libraries have never had that role, and the idea of aiming to be the best way to get all information is more frightening than it is desirable.

At the same time as I object to the pretense that some new ideology should sweep through libraries, I’m really excited about the possibilities inherent in technologies that are labelled web 2.0. I was a booster of blogs and rss in my library, have recently become addicted to netvibes and writely, and spend lots of my time thinking about how we can make penntags (tags.library.upenn.edu), our new social bookmarking tool, as useful as possible. Promoting these new technologies in my library would be a lot easier if there weren’t other technology boosters out there claiming that the smart, knowledgeable, savvy librarians I work with “don’t get it,” or that they never really cared about patrons and are against change.

Alternate titles for this post: There is no such thing as Library 2.0 and this is a blog post about it. (Apologies for bastardizing the first line of Steven Shapin’s book The Scientific Revolution.) How many angels can dance on…

You said pretty much everything I would’ve liked to if I had the gumption to undertake something like this. I, too, believe that some of the historical is coming out now as you said in response to my post. Certainly after this exercise on your part, it may well come to the fore. One can hope.

Excellent overall, but the Epilogue was particularly wonderful. Thanks again!

By the way, there’s another slight ugliness in the special C&I, one that I couldn’t avoid. I’ll bet Dorothea spotted it but was kind enough not to mention it…

Just to avoid suspense: Friz Quadrata does not come in an italic (or if it does, I don’t have it). Thus, the names of blogs in level-2 headings are in slanted roman type rather than italic type. (Of course, if I used quotes around blog names instead if italicizing them, the problem would go away…)

Lower-case “a”s are the usual giveaway, at least in any serif or transitional type (is “transitional” the right word for Friz Quadrata’s semi-serif design?): If you look at Library crunch in the subheading, you’ll see that the “a” is just a slanted roman a, where in the paragraph that follows (in Berkeley Book, which most definitely does have a well-designed italic), it’s an italic a, an entirely different creature. (On the other hand, Berkeley Book has the little curiosity that there’s no bold. Rather than let Word “embolden,” I use “bold” as a character style, bringing up Berkeley Bold–not Berkeley Book Bold–and just have to remember never to use ctrl-b or the “b” button for boldface…”emboldened” type looks really bad when it’s in as elegant a setting as Berkeley Book!)

Yes, I’m still a semi-recovering typeface geek. Anyone who knows that I spent serious money buying Berkeley Oldstyle and Berkeley Oldstyle Book typefaces when I already own 500+ professionally-designed typefaces (bless the old Bitstream CD!) would know that. Not that there was anything wrong with Arrus BT, which I used for the first 4 years of C&I, but Berkeley is just…well…I don’t think serif type gets any better.

And trying to get a tiny little rule to stick where you put it…