Library 2.0

Near the conclusion of the Computers in Libraries Conference in D.C. last week, Paul Miller (pictured at your left) from Talis, a United Kingdom-based library-automation vendor, presented an interesting session about the challenges of Web 2.0 to libraries.
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Lee Rainie from the Pew Internet and American Life Project gave Friday's keynote address. He's a very lively speaker—mentally I started referring to him as Peppie le Pew—and he has lots of data and facts about how Millenials (those born between 1982 and 2000) think, use the Internet, search for information, communicate and form communities, and believe in themselves and the technologically and media rich lives they lead. If Stephen Abram wants facts, Peppie has 'em.

Rainie organized his talk around eight key realities of the Millennial generation: Read More »

Wednesday—The first day of the Computers in Libraries Conference in Washington, DC. It's the 21^st annual, but my first. I was up at 3:00 a.m. to catch my six-a.m.-red-eye flight from Kansas City. After I stumbled out of bed and dressed, I called Max to go for a walk, and he indeed got up off the sofa, but he had a quizzical look on his face as we headed out into the frosty night.

After the walk, off to the airport.
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“Libraries are…" I can't finish that sentence; I can't seem to come up with an encompassing term or pithy phrase to finish it in a way that would do justice to the notion of the library, the value libraries provide to humanity, and all the library facets we encounter in the Information Age.
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Evaluating Our Institutions and Education
The posting of a job at Wayne State University Libraries back in January was worthy of note to me because it was the first time I'd seen Web 2.0 tools specifically mentioned in a job ad. The 2.0 meme was indeed unfurling into many facets of libraries. A few weeks later, Jenny Levine posted about another job—this time for a school media specialist with definite 2.0 duties.
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Less than a month away is HigherEdBlogCon: Transforming Academic Communities with New Tools of the Social Web, a Web-based conference that “will focus on the use of blogs, wikis, RSS, audio and video podcasts, and other digital tools in a range of areas in academe.”
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Lately, I've been wondering if the mashup will become one of the defining characteristics of information technology during this decade. Will we remember this era as much for the mashups as for the mass-digitization crashups? Mashups may rule, while snippets drool.

According to the Wikipedia (visited on March 4, 2006), a mashup in this sense is “…a website or web application that seamlessly combines content from more than one source into an integrated experience." For example, if you're into downhill skiing, visit Ski Bonk for the latest integrated info, which mashes up ski resort reports, weather data, maps, and other data to create its service. Read More »

A few weeks ago, Jenny and I found ourselves at a meeting at ALA Headquarters talking about Web 2.0, learning, and Library 2.0 initiatives with some of the ALA division heads, Mary Ghikas, Senior Associate Executive Director, and the Otter Group's Kathleen Gilroy. As a result of that meeting (and some forward-thinking continuing-education interest and work on the part of Mary Ghikas and the Otter Group), Jenny and I are authoring content for, as well facilitating, an online prototype “Learning 2.0” program that ALA will launch this spring.


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Michael's last post provides a good segue into another nifty program offered through the Metropolitan Library System, which has offices in Burr Ridge and here in ALA-headquarter town, Chicago, IL.
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"All I ever wanted was to know that you were dreaming..."

Allow me a tangent here today—not to really talk about technology directly, but to talk about innovation, thinking creatively, and looking at our services in a new way. I've been writing a lot and reading a lot to prepare my proposal for research at UNT, to start toward my dissertation.
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