Week 6: Thing 15

I'm currently on a search committee for a new Director of Libraries & Technology, so these articles are very useful in helping to understand where our libraries are headed, and therefore where we librarians (library & technology teachers, I should say) are headed. These articles provide an exciting view of the road ahead, a nice alternative to the doom & gloom people who claim that libraries are becoming obsolete.

In Into a New World of Librarianship, Michael Stephens discusses our role as providers. In the past, librarians waited for people to come to them looking for the services. Today it's become our job to push information out to people, provide to them as much information as we know. He describes our patrons as people who are used to finding everything they want, so our role therefore becomes to provide everything to them. Not a small task, but he claims we should seize the opportunity, and find ways to make the quest for information as easy as possible. The "one-button commands", such as Flickr's Blog This and Google's Page Creator are examples of tools we should be aware of and pass on to our patrons to make the job of seeking and disseminating quicker and more efficient. No rest for the weary, I guess.

Chip Nilges in To More Powerful Ways to Cooperate, discusses something that always astounds me about libraries...they're free and they want to help you in any way they can. A simple notion but incredible in this day and age. He talks about "harnessing our collective intelligence", so that we all improve ourselves and our world. And OCLC is putting its words into action. They began by providing their members with ways to share notes, table of contents and reviews with each other. But the piece de resistance is they're working on creating an Open World Cat with no authentication required for using it. It will be available to anyone who wants to use it. What more powerful way is there to cooperate than to make the information easily sharable and totally accessible!

To a Temporary Place in Time takes libraries to infinity and beyond. Dr. Schulty talks in terms that again make me happy to be in this helping profession. Some of her ideas are that libraries are no longer books and buildings, but conversations and communities, nice images for our profession. They are now barrier-free and participatory, as we've moved from Libraries 1.0(commodities) and 2.0 (products) to Library 3.0, Service. She projects a Library 4.0 of experience, a "mind-spa" but intellectually I'm not there yet, but I hope that I get there!

To me, Library 2.0 is fun and exciting. It forces us to keep current and keep exploring in the most fun way, by sharing and collaborating with others. It encourages us to be open and available to share our knowledge with people who can be helped by it, and who in turn will probably have something to teach us. As isolating as sitting at a computer can be, the result is that we can then know how to reach out to others in a more effective and less complicated way. The tools we're learning about and beginning to use are great resources to help us navigate through the overabundance of data and information we have to make sense of. All in all, the new 2.0 library should be the concept, the hub that connects us all to our world.