What is Library 2.0, and what is its significance for academic libraries?

So many words have been spilled on the topic of Library 2.0. A fair amount of the literature is coming from public librarians, with a growing literature from the cadre of academics. I don't intend (and would be foolish to attempt) to cover the broad spectrum of Library 2.0 literature. My goal here is to highlight a few good sources and to get at some of the basic concepts that will be useful to us as academic librarians.

Sometimes it seems that Library 2.0 is all things to all people. A good example of this is Walt Crawford's Cites & Insights 6.2 from Midwinter 2006, in which he compiles "Sixtytwo Views and Seven Definitions." Not to worry: if you read these closely, you'll find that they are not entirely distinct from one another.

Jack M. Maness, a librarian at the University of Colorado at Boulder, offers a good overview of Library 2.0 Theory: Web 2.0 and Its Implications for Libraries. I believe that Maness is on the right track when he claims that "Library 2.0 will revolutionize the profession. Rather than creating systems and services for patrons, librarians will enable users to create them for themselves. A profession steeped in decades of a culture of control and predictability will need to continue moving toward embracing facilitation and ambiguity." I'm not sure how predictable libraries have been in recent years, but he's on target with his notion of a culture of control. Loosening our hold on this will be one of our greatest challenges if we commit ourselves to Library 2.0.

Maness' piece includes a useful comparison between Library 1.0 and Library 2.0 strategies:

• Email reference/Q&A pages ---> Chat reference
• Text-based tutorials ---> Streaming media tutorials with interactive databases
• Email mailing lists, webmasters ---> Blogs, wikis, RSS feeds
• Controlled classification schemes ---> Tagging coupled with controlled schemes
• OPAC ---> Personalized social network interface
• Catalog of largely reliable print and electronic holdings ---> Catalog of reliable and suspect holdings, web-pages, blogs, wikis, etc.

John Blyberg of the Ann Arbor District Library, in his blog posting Library 2.0: The road ahead, states that "L2 is part of an evolution that is taking place worldwide–a movement in which the threshold between technology and individuality is giving way. Those two seemingly disparate concepts are starting to bleed together, creating the emergence of a new culture." The relevance of this to libraries? Michael Casey and Laura Savastinuk say it succintly in their September 2006 Library Journal article: "At its most basic level, the Library 2.0 model gives library users a participatory role in the services libraries offer and the way they are used."

If you think about all the user participation taking place on the popular side of the Web, it's inevitable that this approach to the use of information should come knocking at libraries' doors. I'm actually a little skeptical about some of the claims bandied about on this score, and I'll cover this in future postings.

When all is said and done (and it surely hasn't been yet!), the notion of Library 2.0 appears to be coalescing around a handful of basic concepts. I think LITA President Bonnie Postletwaite came up with a very useful list in her blog posting LITA 2.0.

• Flexibility and nimbleness to enable rapid change
• Commitment to continuous improvement based on assessment
• Interactive and collaborative services driven by users needs
• Taking the library to the users AND making the library a destination
• Embracing radical trust
• Use of new technological tools to accomplish the above

I would add that the last item is optional.

Let's use these ideas as our starting point.