...Library 2.0 and more....

I've removed the article I posted earlier here in favor of a more recent and better-written one from the "Library Journal" website:


By John N. Berry III, Editor-at-Large jberry@reedbusiness.com -- Library Journal, 4/15/2007

Be thankful that someone like Laura Cohen, web support librarian at the University at Albany, NY, comes along to give us the insight we need to understand and proceed when the chaos and confusion of accelerating change gets out of hand. I came a few months late to Laura's blog, Library 2.0: An Academic's Perspective. Back in November 2006, she posted “A Librarian's 2.0 Manifesto,” and it was truly an epiphany for this old librarian, so embedded in the traditions of Library 1.0. (You'll find the document at tinyurl.com/ybwq6s.) Here's a small sample from Cohen:

I will educate myself about the information culture of my users and look for ways to incorporate what I learn into library services. I will not be defensive about my library but will...make an honest assessment about what can be accomplished.

I will recognize that libraries change slowly and will work with my colleagues to expedite our responsiveness to change.

I will be courageous about proposing new services and new ways of providing services....

I was further inspired by the mashup of Cohen's manifesto produced and set to music and images by the Pickering Public Library, Ont., at www.myplus.ca/manifestofinal.html.

In libraries of every type, from that “experience [public] library” in Cerritos, CA, to the ivy-covered halls of America's academic and research institutions, the new library is emerging. Librarians are winnowing a functional set of technological apparatus and software out of the onslaught of new devices for the discovery and retrieval of content and its incorporation into current knowledge or information. They are defining and selecting the best of the old and new services and organizational models to create what they call Library 2.0, although it looks as though they have already surpassed that place and number. In the process, they have rediscovered and understood that most important insight, the old cliché that change, especially technological change, accelerates at a rate that requires constant attention to separate the fads and fashions from the functional. (For more on Library 2.0, see the article by Michael E. Casey and Laura C. Savastinuk, LJ 9/1/06, p. 40, and “Journey to Library 2.0,” in this issue, p. 36.)

Last month, the buzz was devoted to the decision of the School of Information at the University of Michigan to add six new specializations, including one in social computing, to the offerings for its library and information services (LIS) students. The school claims that it is the first to include such a specialization, but don't be too quick to ask what or how one teaches “social computing”: just look around; you'll find a bit of it in most LIS programs and all over the practice.

LIS programs have finally begun the kind of fundamental reform they will need to serve Librarians 2.0 as they progress into Libraries 3.0, 4.0, and beyond. LIS programs are becoming individualized, specialized, technologically sophisticated, and unrecognizable through the lenses of anyone who graduated with an MLS 25 years ago.

Recent examples of Librarianship 2.0 follow hundreds that came before. They prove that, despite our worst fears of obsolescence and entrenchment in the past, libraries are actually one of the few public sector institutions or agencies responding fully to the pressure of change. While the newest librarians are sometimes impatient with the old institution's pace of change and resistance to it, they have still become champions of the survival of libraries and the job libraries do to meet unique societal needs. The cadres of Library 2.0, like Laura Cohen, will not only be the ones who guarantee that there is a future for libraries, they will create that future.


As I read up more on this, I will return to post more on Library 2.0...