Week 8, Thing 16: perspectives on Library 2.0

16. Read a few perspectives on Web 2.0, Library 2.0 and the future of libraries and blog your thoughts.

I read all the listed articles from the OCLC newsletter and really felt like so much of the content was more applicable to public libraries or high school libraries than my elementary school library. But I definitely saw the point: libraries can't keep doing things the old way and expect to remain relevant to our patrons. I liked what Dr. Wendy Schultz said in To a temporary place in time...: "create a global, and globally accessible, catalog; invite readers to tag and comment." And actually, John J. Riemer said the same thing in To better bibliographic services: "Libraries should welcome the submission of reviews, assignment of keywords (“tagging”)..." Wouldn't that just make teacher's lives so much easier, if they could tag things in the library catalog with their own comments about what units they used things for? As it is, I can create bibliographies with that information (and I'm sure I could train the teachers to do it themselves, which of course plays into the issue of user education brought up by Rick Anderson in Away from the “icebergs”) but just think if patrons could easily do those tasks themselves, in a way that made things more useful and accessible to them.