Alternate titles for this post:

  1. 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.)
  2. How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? And are pin-dancing angels really Library 2.0?

I have spent the last week or so reading and thinking a lot about “Library 2.0″; what it means, how useful the term is, and so on. I capped off the binge Monday with a reading of Walt Crawford’s 32-page special issue of Cites & Insights titled Library 2.0 and “Library 2.0″

So now I have a Library 2.0 hangover like you wouldn’t believe. Hangover as in “geez, that was fun…I think…” and hangover as in “let’s never do that again.”

Listen: I care a lot about many of the things that people write about under the heading of “Library 2.0.” I am caring less and less about the term itself, and am certainly not interested in (a) splitting hairs about what is and isn’t Library 2.0 or (b) participating in a “with us or against us” campaign. I don’t like it when politicians take that line, and I certainly don’t like it when librarians do.

So today, I’d like to give a few last thoughts on Library 2.0 for the time being, and get back to trying to be a better librarian, and to making my library better. All but the incurably masochistic will be happy to know that this is a whittled-down version of what I had originally intended to post. I took out some criticism of Walt Crawford’s article (which is, on balance, very good and very useful), some responses to rhetorical questions (as Homer Simpson says, “do I know what rhetorical means?”), and other stuff. And, at the end, there is a little punchline for those who read that far.

  • Here is why I was originally excited about Library 2.0 (please note that this is not yet another attempt to define the subject): when I read about Library 2.0, I found people who were exploring the same things I was interested in, like the relationship of Web 2.0 technologies and ideas to libraries; using lightweight publishing tools like blogs, and collaborative tools like wikis in the library; and, looking farther down the road, trying to figure out what something like a library catalog or article database might look like if it took full advantage of the web. It also spoke to my fear that libraries were stuck, not in “Library 1.0,” but in “Library 95,” where we have put a lot of our stuff on the web, but haven’t yet adequately integrated ourselves to what people expect from a web experience.
  • I agree with Walt Crawford that the library can’t be the be-all and end-all for everyone’s information and cultural needs–it sure isn’t for mine. But I also think that libraries need to try to make our tools compatible with users’s expectations of how the web works, so when using the library is appropriate for that person, they can integrate their library research better with their existing behaviors on the web. For example, after a library instruction session I did last semester, a student told me he wanted to use del.icio.us to keep track of his research (he brought up del.icio.us, I didn’t) and I had to tell him that I didn’t think it would work very well, due to the fact that stable URLs in library catalogs and databases are sometimes hard to come by (not to mention problems of authentication, etc.). Now that’s just one student, but I think that question of “how can I put all this useful library stuff you are showing me with all the rest of the stuff I am reading/researching/keeping track of?” will become more and more common.
  • Old lesson, re-learned: Be careful what you wish for. One of my reasons for starting a blog was to get involved with conversations exactly like this one. But having to defend posts and comments that felt in their composition more like “thinking out loud” than “my last word on the subject” can be sobering.
  • Frankly, reading Walt Crawford’s piece was a bit of a slog–a necessary and important slog, but the very nature of his project made it a slog nonetheless. Here are the passages that were, for me, like a drink of cool water on long, hot march:
    • Luke Rosenberger on the “read-write library”: “Library 2.0 should be for us, in part, what StoryCorps has been for radio–we offer our communities the tools, the hosting, the infrastructure, and they bring the stories for us and others to learn from.”
    • Aaron Schmidt on social software: “Panacea? No, of course not. A step in the right direction? Yes.”
    • Roy Tennant (and, indirectly, Dan Chudnov): “Moving beyond silo-ized “destination” systems to expose our information and services in a wide variety of methods to a diverse set of consuming applications is a good thing…. If that’s Library 2.0, then so be it. Call it whatever you want, just stop anguishing over it. As Dan Chudnov says, “Now stop boring us, and help build it.
    • Thomas Dowling: “What really is new and exciting, in my experience, is that the Library 2.0 banner is being picked up by librarians who insist that it move forward with all due speed. If there isn’t a commercial option that meets their needs, they will turn to a growing set of high-quality tools to build–and share–the solutions they want. It is a new sense of ownership over those services and a new set of relationships with both vendors and others in the library community.”

Oh, and the punchline? On Monday morning, I got a somewhat tentative go-ahead on my proposal to write an article on Library 2.0 for an issue of Colorado Libraries about “Managing Change in Libraries.” I’m going to give myself a few days to sleep off this Library 2.0 hangover before starting in on that. Actually, revisiting Library 2.0 in a little while with the goal of writing something more detached and less immediate than a blog post, and aimed somewhere besides the world of library bloggers, should be good for me. Colorado Libraries doesn’t ask the author to sign away copyright, so if that article comes to pass, I’ll post it here.

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