I guess if you say that scale, leadership, skills and priorities are the current barriers to Library 2.0, than I think we are in agreement on at least this point. Library 2.0 seems to be empirically (and perhaps necessarily) preceded by Librarian 2.0.

Perhaps where we disagree is that I see the stalling of significant changes to library services due to Library 2.0 as largely environmental. While facebook (eg.) environment makes sense in a social space, libraries as social space is something that is going to take a lot of grooming to be accepted.

The focus on the librarian as educator seems to support my point. Changing hearts may in fact be easier (though it seems hard at times) than changing spaces -- even virtual ones.

Ryan, many thanks for your comment. Overall, I was heartened by your post. It was your paragraph about waiting for Society 2.0 that struck me as inapplicable to academic librarianship. This statement did help me to clarify my thoughts - or at least attempt to!

I agree that libraries as social spaces will take a lot of work. My concern from reading your post was that librarians might come to believe that Librarian 2.0 is Library 2.0.

Whenever you seek to transform an environment, the people who will potentially do the transforming need to be changed in their thinking first. This seems to me self-evident, and hardly limited to Library 2.0.

So I don't see a disjunction between Librarian 2.0 and Library 2.0. This is the point I was attempting to make in my post. We're in the midst of a process. For academic librarians to succeed in their role as educators, the provision of a 2.0 environment is an integral part of their mission. The environment is the education. The fact that there are barriers does not remove this from the equation.

This is an interesting discussion, and I appreciate your participation.

I agree entirely with your(Laura's) view. Libraries have always been a social space. That social space is now being extended to cyberspace becuase of Web 2.0 and Library 2.0. Libraries must be ahead of society in general. I actaully think that "Society 2.0" is already here and libraries are actullay playing catchup in many ways.

Bill, nicely said.

Another very interesting post! I totally agree with you, Laura – our job is to educate our users, be they the general public or students, and we can only do this by staying ahead of the game, making sure we fully understand these new technologies ourselves and their potential, and then showing our users ways in which the technology can enrich their experience of the library.

One of the thoughts I have about Library 2.0 in academic libraries, at least here in the UK, is that maybe there is the potential that academic libraries could lag a bit behind public libraries, since some people may have the perception that we don’t have to try so hard to encourage new users through the door with new services, as with public libraries, so maybe we can just let the public libraries get involved in all these new technologies, and our students will just have to accept the services we offer. This, in my opinion, is wrong – we should continually strive to enrich our students’ experience of our services, and find new ways in which we could improve these services and encourage their use.

I think it’s a modern requirement of our job to understand new ways of doing things, such as using Web 2.0 technologies, so that we can think about appropriate ways of harnessing these new ideas to make life easier for our users – if not us in the library world, then who? We cannot wait ‘til these ideas take hold in society generally before we adopt them – we should be the ones spreading the ideas in society! In my view, it would be a missed opportunity to just sit back and wait to see what ‘takes off’ – we should be taking a lead and provide different examples and ideas of how to employ these new services to solve various problems, after all, we should be the ones to know what problems need solving and therefore what solutions are needed. The users will soon decide which ideas they find useful and which not – that’s where the democracy comes in. We must grab this great opportunity to show that we can be technologically savvy and can provide interesting and exciting answers to problems, rather than resorting to type and always giving the impression that we’re not really that comfortable with all this new technology.

If all this sounds a bit woolly, let me give you a concrete example. Our IT department have just released the next version of Internet Explorer : 7. This version, as you probably know, contains new functionality making it easier to find and store RSS feeds – a Web 2.0 idea. Most of our students probably haven’t heard of RSS or may not see the use to their studies, so who’s going to educate them – the IT department? They consider their job is to provide the software and solve any problems with it, not to show users how to get the contents page of the latest edition of a journal via RSS! Surely this should be where we come in, especially in an academic environment. We should be publicising what the software can do, and provide different ideas of how users could use it to enhance their studies, such as saving feeds from particular journals, feeds from specific searches, etc. To do this, we have to understand RSS ourselves first, and thus we must stay informed in these areas. Every time we just shrug our shoulders and point the students in the direction of IT when they ask us what that orange icon on the toolbar does, we are missing an opportunity to break that library stereotype, and if we just wait ‘til RSS takes off among our users, we are depriving them and ourselves of using a really useful tool, and any potential other uses that we or they might think of for using it, while we wait for someone else to teach them.

Lindsay, Thanks for your insightful comment. You could have written this post for me!

Your example about RSS reminds me of something I've been thinking about lately. Back about a decade ago, the staff in my library offered instruction classes about using the Web. Back then, we encountered students who barely knew how to use a mouse. So we taught them. We librarians were already comfortable with mice. In other words, we were ahead of the game then. We were the only place on campus where a student could come to learn how to use a mouse. I see the newer information technologies in the same light. I couldn't agree with you more on this point.

I also agree that academics might lag behind public librarians because they feel they have a captive audience on campus. I've actually blogged about this. My view is, our audience is not captive. Our users have choices now and can bypass us if they want. We need to attract users by proving our relevance. Sitting back will not serve us well.

Laura (and Bill),

I think our opinions are fairly close, and, as Laura already mentioned, some of the differences have to do with the differences between public and academic libraries.

If anything, my Library/Librarian 2.0 post was a lament on the lukewarm success of many Library 2.0 initiatives. I guess I was trying to say "Be patient. It will come. Librarians are changing; eventually the systems will come with it."

In the public sphere, libraries are still ahead of the game, despite Bill's "catching up" comment. While there are alot of tech-savy customers out there, I have yet to get a comment asking for RSS feeds. That doesn't mean they don't want them or we shouldn't provide them, but it does mean that society doesn't connect core library services with social software.

And, taking Bill's point about social spaces to heart, I would like to change what I said a little bit. It's not that libraries aren't ideal social spaces, it's that people do not yet make the connection between libraries and social softwares. It's not yet natural for people to think "libraries are the ideal place to take my Facebook use to the next level." They use our computers to get on Facebook, but they don't (yet) expect us to be able to recommend good applications to add to their profile.

In the end, I believe the human interest, the social component that society 2.0 will be interested in will have to include librarians. YouTube is a good example. Ninja librarian is more interesting to the Web 2.0 world than a one-angle taping of storytime at the local library. Libraries could change this, but the skill-set is not in knowing how to YouTube, but in how to create a film. And film-creation is not a skill that the public expects librarians to have. Follow the same logic with Facebook application development. Accepting librarians as web developers is another rather foreign concept. If our vendors. . . (ok. I won't go there, but I think you can follow my point). And continue the logic to radio announcement (podcasting), professional photography (Flickr), competitive videogaming (Wii) and matchmaking (Second Life). While this may sound a bit Gorman-ish, there is a risk here in that we will take on all these activities and not be able to describe succinctly what it is that make libraries valuable to society.

The public does not want to see us getting into such things as film creation at the cost of our core services -- namely 1) helping them get their homework done and 2) having lots of books (and other resources) available for them to read. While libraries need a face in the online world, we also have to consider what our clientele expects from us. Until our patrons begin to expect us to have Facebook accounts, library 2.0 is going to be a slow-moving process.

In short, it's still hard to find the solid ground for library 2.0 services. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try. The adaptation strategy, therefore, has become 1) learn as much as we can 2) experiment and play with new technologies 3) discover how these technologies help us engage our own interests (eg. film) and act individually on those desires & 4) pilot the services that make the most sense in the local situation for our respective libraries.

Ryan, I would never accuse you of being "Gorman-ish"!

Thanks for your clarifications. As I pointed out in my posting, I believe that academic librarians have two roles to play, one that is expected of users and one that is not. It's the latter role that I think is critical for my colleagues. Taking your RSS example (and we seem to agree on this), the students on my campus may not be asking for it, but there are many services we can provide with RSS-enabled data that it's a good bet would benefit them.

This is why I'm beginning to evolve in my thinking about the issue of assessment and what it consists of. The components of self-assessment and environmental scan are really important parts of assessment.

Thanks for continuing to make me think!