I was very pleased to see Karen Coomb's article in the January issue of Information Today, "Building a Library Web Site on the Pillars of Web 2.0." Karen describes her work at the University of Houston Libraries to revamp the infrastructure of the library's site based on 2.0 principles. It's a great read.

I was especially happy to see this line: "...we decided to make the Web site a combination of different technologies including blogs, wikis, and the [Web site's] content management system." This echoes the ideas in my entry about the ideal library 2.0 academic Web site, so it's gratifying to see a major institution coming to the same conclusions and pledging to move forward. I'll be watching the UH project with interest.

Karen describes a very ambitious project. And ambitious projects, undertaken by individual libraries, frustrate me. Just think of it: all that amazing work benefits just one campus. When I think of all that we might accomplish, in all of our libraries, I don't see how we can make significant progress if we move forward one library at a time. Especially with ideas that many of us may want to explore, the situation just doesn't scale. This leads me to the question I discussed in my entry, Go Solo or Collaborate?. In that entry, I concluded that efforts by both individual libraries and groups/consortia are necessary to move us forward.

Now I'm thinking about a third option. When individual libraries succeed at launching worthy projects, and the results are not shared, what is gained? Well, that library's constituencies are happy, and we're happy for them. But the benefits don't necessarily accrue to the profession.

I'm hoping that we can develop a culture of sharing successful projects across libraries. I know this is done informally. My own library has shared code from time to time. And yes, there is the Library Success wiki that is useful in that it links to examples and various types of supporting resources. But sharing our successes on an infrastructure level is another matter, and something that many of us don't necessarily think about when we've launched a project.

I'm not implying that UH specifically should share the results of its project with the rest of us. I'm saying that I hope that libraries overall will consider sharing the guts of their accomplishments. Especially in the open source world, sharing source code, modules, methods, etc. should be feasible. Maybe we could set up a clearinghouse.

One challenge is the 2.0 notion of perpetual beta. All code needs to be revised over time. But a great beta could launch other libraries on their way - other libraries which, in turn, could share their own accomplishments.