So you probably don’t need me to tell you this, but David Lee King wrote a post Wednesday called Am I a 2.0 Librarian and the Library 2.0 Spectrum. It featured an image that he titled Library 2.0 Spectrum. Some people really liked what David had to say and how he illustrated it with the image. Some didn’t like it.

I didn’t like it.

The post drew a lot of comments, including a few from me.

David, walking his 2.0 talk, chose to engage the critics rather than write us off, and came up with another post, Library 2.0 spectrum thingie – asking for your input!, and got a boatload of new comments, including one from me.

I called in to Uncontrolled Vocabulary last night specifically to talk about this. Uncontrolled Vocabulary, besides having about the best title ever, is fun to listen to and even more fun when calling in. If you want to hear the segment where we discuss David’s post, it starts around 41 minutes in.

I haven’t taken a comprehensive survey of other blogs’ responses to David’s posts, but a notable one comes from Cindi at Chronicles of Bean. Her post, David’s Librarian 2.0 Spectrum Thingie is in the form of a video. She uses David’s posts as a prompt for her own thoughts on “librarian 2.0.” I find her take on the subject more appealing, as she seems to look at all this “2.0″ stuff as a way of thinking or working, and less as an ultimate destination or doctrine.

You might think I have said enough about this already, but I just wanted to add a few more thoughts to explain where I’m coming from:

  • I think it’s fine when people emphasize technology when they talk “2.0.”
  • I object when people treat “2.0” as if it were something that exists in some platonic sense. If you want to talk about 2.0 as a group of tools or techniques or ideas, I’m ready to talk. If you want to talk about it as if it were a state of nirvana that we are all striving toward–as something that one either “gets” or doesn’t “get”–I’m out. I don’t “get it.”
  • It bugs me when librarians seem to be denigrating books.
  • I think my “traditional library skills” are where I need the most work. For example, I bet I could help more people, faster, if I knew our reference collection better.
  • Similarly, if we stopped doing all the “2.0” stuff we do at my library–Flickr, IM reference, blogs, wikis, all of it–we’d have a few minor inconveniences. If we stopped doing all the “traditional” stuff we do, we’d all be fired.