For months, folks in the library world have been talking about the idea of Library 2.0. I’ve been reading a lot, and thinking a lot, and digesting a lot, but I haven’t blogged about it at all, neither here nor at lbr. In the last couple of weeks, some important voices I respect really challenged me to put some hard thought into what this idea means. Walt Crawford asked for real definitions (in 200 words or less), Stephen Cohen and T. Scott challenge us to really look at how (and whether) L2 is concretely different from L1, and Michael Casey gives some real historical perspective with a thought-provoking quote from from John Cotton Dana that appeared in Library Journal 109 years ago.
The more I read and the more I digest, the more things are starting to coalesce around a central idea — what I find exciting about Library 2.0, and how it is different (in my view) than Library 1.0. I don’t know if I can do it in 200 words or less, but here goes:
When I read through Tim O’Reilly’s paper “What is Web 2.0,” the common theme I see throughout is this: creating applications that leverage end-user participation (instead of just pushing content/functionality at users) results in richer applications. Web 2.0 is the end of the one-way diatribe that was a vestige of Mass Marketing in the Mass Media age — Web 2.0 is about building a platform for a conversation where the voices and information flow freely. Some industry pundits have taken to using the term “read-write web” to express this idea. To me, Library 2.0 is about crossing that same threshold — from the library as a one-way conversation to the “read-write library”. What does that mean?
In Library 1.0, the resources, the authorities, the information we managed lived on the shelves, between the pages, or behind a login that we knew and managed. Knowledge came down off the shelf, we checked it out to the patron, they took it home & digested it, and they brought it back so someone else could benefit from it. In Library 2.0, however, the content and information we manage is just as likely to come from the patrons themselves. Sure, back in Library 1.0 we were more than happy to include manuscripts and published works by local authors and researchers in our local history collections; in some adventurous libraries, we even collected ‘zines. But we didn’t have a way to actually provide a platform for our patrons to publish their own ideas, thoughts, and experiences — they had to find the means on their own. Now it’s different — now we do have the means, and if we take seriously our professional mission to collect and preserve the collective knowledge and experience of our communities, we may very well start considering it a responsibility. Library 2.0 should be for us, in part, what StoryCorps has been for radio — we offer our communities the tools, the hosting, the infrastructure, and they bring the stories for us and others to learn from. The examples that are out there already are inspiring: Ann Arbor District Library has pictureAnnArbor, whose “mission is to gather, capture and share information and images that reflect everyday life in our community.” The Western Springs History site built by Thomas Ford Memorial Library and the Western Springs Historical Society is another example, which reminds me of a story I heard of a UK library that made a major project of encouraging its patrons to build a comprehensive local history of the area — inside Wikipedia (anybody out there remember the place?)
A few academic libraries have dipped their toes in this water by beginning to establish themselves as institutional repositories, but that’s just a start. This is pretty scary stuff, of course, because it upsets the roles we have developed so carefully. We can’t do “collection development” on a blog that we host for a patron or community organization — because we have no idea what that patron might write in the future. What if it’s something controversial? Will we be forced to ask that patron to take down “inappropriate” material, or will we stand up to pressure and defend the citizen’s right to post that material on library webspace? And our usual circ statistics certainly won’t give any indication of all this information exchange between our patrons. But the change — the participation of our patrons — goes even further…
In Library 1.0, we professionals did the cataloguing. We decided what subject headings and classification would apply to our materials. In Cataloguing 2.0, however, we invite our users to tag materials with headings that have meaning for them. In Library 1.0, our tech services folks built, configured and ran the OPAC interface. If you wanted to use the OPAC, you came to our website and used it as we gave it to you. In Library 2.0, however, sharp patrons like Jon Udell and Edward Vielmetti build catalog interfaces that suit them — and then offer them up for others to use as well. We have no idea how you’re interfacing with our system — an RSS feed from Library Elf, using our Z39.50 data in LibraryThing, using an IM bot to search from your mobile phone (like Makebot), or a custom tool like LibX.
Of course, in Library 1.0, we were happy to take patrons’ suggestions. That was part of our outreach, our way of staying in touch with our community, going clear back to John Cotton Dana in 1896 — we did surveys, we held focus groups, we assembled advisory committees, we posted suggestion boxes. Just make sure you submit your suggestion in triplicate and Library 1.0 will take it under advisement. But we never confused the suggestion box with the stacks — if the patrons had something to say, it went into the suggestion box, it wouldn’t become part of the “collection.” The collections and services of Library 2.0, on the other hand, are built by, built from, and built for patrons’ own voices, images, video, audio, writings, needs, preferences, program code, scripting, ideas, and innovations.
Hmm, a little over 700 words. Oh well. The bottom line is: to me, Library 2.0 is a conversation, where the information, expertise, knowledge, resources, and materials available are just as likely to come from the patrons as they are from the shelves. As librarians in this new environment, our goal should be to encourage the broadest possible participation in the “read-write library,” using all the tools available to us (new or old), and continue to do what we do best — make connections between people and the information sources they need, whether those come from the shelves, from their neighbors, from their ancestors, or from their children.
