Library 2.0

This blog entry has taken me forever to formulate. I started out reading OCLC’s information on Library 2.0, took an entire page of notes and then Googled Library 2.0 to see what else would come up.

As a dear friend says “Great Googly Moogly!!!” 144,000,000 hits.

The first was a Library Journal article by Michael E. Casey and Laura Savastinuk dated 9/1/06. This is a good article with an overview of L2.0…and down at the bottom of the article there is a selection of 2.0 resources, including blogs, key readings, and 2.0 on the web.

Clicking on all these links gave me a ton of information on what people think L2.0 is. And Great Googly Moogly are there opinions!! Whew!

My personal opinion is that a Library 2.0, Library 2nd Edition, Library Updated Version, or whatever you want to call it is a user centered library. HOWEVER…While I am a firm believer in a user centered library, I am also very pro-staff. I think I’m more of a holistic library 2.0 person. This way both the patrons AND the staff get the most benefit out of the library. Not only is it a good place to be, but a comfortable and happy place to work.

In Rick Anderson’s Away from the Icebergs he states:

“We need to focus our efforts not on teaching research skills but on eliminating the barriers that exist between patrons and the information they need, so they can spend as little time as possible wrestling with lousy search interfaces and as much time as possible actually reading and learning… Obviously, we’ll help and educate patrons when we can, and when they want us to, and the more we can integrate our services with local curricula, the better. But if our services can’t be used without training, then it’s the services that need to be fixed—not our patrons."

Yepper that’s a roger, you betcha, yessiree Bob!!

However, I think one of the main barriers that needs to be eliminated is the barrier that sometimes exists between the patron and the library staff. There are many cases where the patron is afraid of asking what they consider a stupid question, not knowing what to ask, or even who to ask. If we don’t know the services are not user friendly, then we can’t fix them. We may have become so used to working our way around something that it no longer occurs to us that a system is not user friendly. Taking a step back and looking through the eyes of the user benefits both user and staff.