15 On Library 2.0, Web 2.0 and other stuff

After a break while my daughter was quite sick, in and out of hospital for a month I'm back!! They finally decided to take out her appendix and she is better now, so it is all systems go.

So library 2.0 and Web 2.0, well, I love it a lot, but I also loathe it just a little. I think it is a great way for people who may be far apart for whatever reasons to be able to communicate and share information. I think all the social networking is ok, but in is it all really necessary?? My fourteen year old comes home and gets onto msn, or myspace and talks online with people who she has just spent all day with at school, but try and get her to make an actual phone call and talk with an actual body rather than use a keyboard, sometimes that's like pulling teeth. That aspect of all of this scares me a little, in this rush towards social networking are we forgetting the basic social skills???

In the library world many of these skills can be used for good rather than evil. The often proposed idea of wikis for staff manuals or book groups, blogs for the younger generation to interact with us old fogey library staff and more interactive library catalogues are all great ideas. Sometimes in this rush towards being so technologically savy are we disregarding the needs of the less technologically savy of our patrons? Some of the older patrons who come to my library have no desire to get the latest and best reads in their favourite genre emailed to them as they have no desire to ever have an email address, so we have to balance the needs of all our patrons without favouring one group over another.

I think the library of the future will still have books in it, maybe not as many, but the ability to get books from further afield helps this, I think it will still be staffed by actual people, we will just have more advanced skills in all things web 2.0

So I guess I see a future bright with the glow of library 2.0 and 3.0, 4.0 and beyond, but hope that the people who do still like to hold a book in their hands and feel the paper as it turns are not neglected in this rush towards reading books on your mobile phone as you network electronically with your vast friend network of people you have never met.