23 Things - Thing 3

Completed :)

Thing 3 RSS

I always thought RSS was just a way to get news feeds sent to your email. I guess I didn't fully understand all that it entailed. So I set myself up with Google Reader and since I have a gmail account that wasn't too hard. Most of my websites I visit though do not have an RSS feed, so I was kind of disappointed, but I was able to add some librarian sites I occassionally visit. Maybe as I spend more time I will be able to find more sites I am interested in connecting with.

23 Things - Thing 2

Completed :)

Web 2.0/Lib 2.0

Wow! All interesting articles. Many interesting ideas, concepts, opinions. Exciting and challenging for us at MCPL. Where to begin ?

I enjoyed Howard's presentation on staff day about 2.0, but I found these articles to be very helpful for me in understanding all that 2.0 entails. I am glad I read all of them.

A key concept for me that appeared in almost all the articles:

1. Change is important and necessary for libraries to embrace. Library 2.0 demands it.

Library 2.0 presents us with a series of requirements that necessitate some measure of restructuring within our organizations. Whether it’s shifting money around a budget for a coder instead of another reference librarian, or reevaluating the mission of a particular department, some things have to change in order to accommodate the types of changes we’re talking about.

"L2 requires drastic and sweeping changes to our internal cultures and will require some form of institutional enlightenment."

"Library 2.0 simply means making your library’s space (virtual and physical) more interactive, collaborative, and driven by community needs. ....include blogs, gaming nights for teens, collaborative photo sites......

"We’ve reached a level of critical mass now, however, that will require vendors to open up their black boxes and let us in. This is not some small increment of change, but a complete overhaul in the relationship we have to this software and its vendors."

My favorite line from one of the articles:
Library 2.0 is something important for librarians to become involved in as it may radically change our customer service and interaction.

Yet, one of the comments to the one blog "I think it is very easy for those of us who are comfortable with libraries and technology to automatically assume that just because we’re doing something new, it needs to be transferred to library patrons. The latest development in social software is probably not of much interest to the average public library patron, and I don’t think it should be. As a library patron, I don’t want my public library to be “2.0″, I just want it to be open on the weekends during the summer so I can actually be able to go there and check out books. I think the example over at Information Wants to be Free of a library stocked with popular fiction at a mall does much more"

This patron's comment is a sample of how I think many patrons will feel, but do we as librarians force them into experiencing 2.0? or do we just hold the crumb out there and entice them to eat? Eventually they will taste and a new 2.0 user will be born! How long did it take for users to learn to surf the web, to create an email account, to search the catalog online? These articles are calling libraries to embrace 2.0 , be creative and reach out? Hmmmm? Will we?

Libraries are not made; they grow.
- Augustine Birrell

23 Things--Thing 1

Completed :)