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The Ongoing Web Revolution

I appreciated this article a lot more that John Blyberg's blog entry. However, it took me several chunks of time to read, so I just made notes about some of its concepts.

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If the internet is the new newspaper, and blogging is where people are going to get their information about their worlds (not the outside world, necessarily, but their own little worlds), then blogland seems like a good place for the library to be.

The upside of blogging is that, unlike the local suburban newspapers, nobody's going to cut your book review column to fit in more advertising.

The downside is that no freestanding library blog is going to get the number of readers who got that local newspaper twice a week. The blog will have to be somewhere that has a huge usership, somewhat like foot traffic in the mall . . . which is handy since Library 1.0 has an enormous following in the library's online catalog.

I do like the idea of comments-enabled catalog entries. Why go to Amazon to find out whether a book is any good?


I'm much more in charity with these people than with Mr. Blyberg, but this article does join most articles about new trends for libraries, in that it scorns "the old ways." (This article doesn't go quite so far as to demonize them.) Sure, libraries are still focused on how to protect people's privacy. Hello, it's the law.

Young teens couldn't care less about protecting their identity; they're too ignorant to know or care what criminals can do with it. But everybody old enough to have a bank account and credit cards still cares. That's what pseudonyms are for.

Some library 2.0 advocates claim that library buildings are outmoded, and in fact always have been a barrier to finding information. I say there are still more people who can walk, ride, or roll to a library building with its wealth of information (and HELP) than people who have computers and can use them fully to find everything they need with no immediate outlay of cash.

There is a mountain of information available on the internet that you have to pay for. Information's still a commodity, and that's not likely to change as long as any company can sell it.

I have found out what my uncle, a man who's pretty tech savvy for someone over 70, uses his computer for -- mainly spamming me with internet 'humor.'

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I think allowing unmoderated public posting in library space is an interesting idea -- user generated content is always a crapshoot; just ask MySpace -- but I suspect the driving force behind "unmoderated" is that library staff doesn't have time to moderate it. Fortunately, that so-horrible upright and uptight vision of what libraries are and what they're for might limit the number and kind of library blog readers and responders. :)

Allowing the staff to post unmoderated seems pretty obvious -- it's somebody's job on the line, after all. I note they're providing their staff with rules on postings.

I read a couple of the shorter articles in that volume also, including one on using Flickr and its products in the library blog. As I digest more about Library 2.0, I feel more able to get past the hype. (After all, if it ain't a REVOLUTION, why would anyone pay any attention these days?)

Basically, they're saying that libraries should incorporate social networking space, either by their presence on ready-made social networking sites or on their own space or both. It's hard to imagine most of my online pals caring whether RCPL is on MySpace . . . or to imagine somebody paying me, the Second Life Librarian, to answer questions from some woman in San Antonio.

As an aside, 70% of the women on Second Life are using male avatars, so I'm guessing that most avatars you see belong to a woman. Besides, all the men are over on World of Warcraft.

But it wouldn't hurt anything to be there, and I find it quite reassuring in my staid old-fashioned heart that the GIANT ALL NEW SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT REVOLUTION is just the usual stuff, applied to libraries. Of course, just building a library's own platform for interaction could be time consuming and costly.

Wow, the transparent library uses community open houses . . . kind of like every other library does every day.