Finally a chance to work a bit more on all the Things. Library 1.0 and the rest of life have been keeping me pretty busy.
As I am reading John Blyberg's commentary, it occurs to me that my library system is perhaps ahead of the game in some ways. We offer rss feeds to many of our catalog and subject guide pages (and I guess the subject guides are also an aspect of the 2.0 world, being on line resources); we have great connectivity to our catalog for renewals, requests, author alerts, etc.; we have a large selection of downloadable audio books, which I personally adore; we have an entire web services department, including a teen web services specialist and our own MySpace page; we use IM for virtual reference, which from a librarian provider point of view is a substantial improvement over the specialized software we have used previously: anyway, you get the drift.
Continuing to read comments on John's blog, one person says "Library 2.0 means providing the same level of service to the elderly and the Boomers, but improving services only to young people." Well, I am working on this at the Info desk, and jumping up to help a woman apply for her Social Security on line. Isn't that part of 2.0? Is helping grandmas get an email account so they can get new photos of the grandkids 2.0? Maybe not, according to Stephen Abrams, who refers to the web as a 'small change'.
Next day: back on the Info desk with a little time to spare. I just checked up on what my closest colleagues had to say on 2.0, and was impressed, especially with Amethyst's commentary on the myriad of services involving library 1.0 which we get every day, while I too have never been asked for help with many of the 23 things. I am sure that will change!
Stephen Abrams talks about immersing ourselves in these new technologies and putting people back into the information. I guess that relates to helping people understand how to tell if an online resource provides reliable information, and that a Google search won't find the resources included in our subscription databases. So how to make the library get 'hits' when someone uses Ask Jeeves et. al. their question? Maybe 'browsing a shelf' ala Ann Arbor is part of this.
Abrams' comments about experiental learning are right on as well. If you spend even a little time with a new thing you lose your fear of it.
Next up: Library Technology Reports.
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