A couple of recent writings have caught my eye, and for the same reason. They feature both wisdom and misapprehensions. The wisdom impresses me, and the misapprehensions concern me.

One of these writings is a blog posting, the other is an article in the January/February issue of American Libraries.

Let me start with the blog posting. This is John Blyberg's recent Library 2.0 Debased. John says some very smart things in this posting, but I also take issue with some of what he says.

First, John takes the 2.0 movement to task:

Then he gives us his advice:

I'll comment on this in a minute. But first, I want to refer to the other writing that caught my eye, Steven Bell's American Libraries piece "Design Thinking." Here, Steven advocates for the employment of design thinking (which he nicely describes and rationalizes) in creating "an exceptional user experience."

Steven believes that many of us are putting the cart before the horse: employing technologies before we figure out which problems they might solve:

Steven mentions the term "bandwagon" a couple of times in his piece. This term has connotations: a certain mindlessness, a lack of planning, and a submission to peer pressure, to name a few.

Believe me, I'm not here to defend every last practice of Library 2.0 as manifested in every last library, or every last conference presentation on the topic. That would be nonsense. But I think these writers - and others who have expressed similar views - give our experiments, our advances, and dare I say even our aspirations, too little credit. The truth is, there is plenty of sophistication going on within Library 2.0, in the rationale, planning, intellectual effort, and technological implementation of initiatives.

I don't know why something that is catching on in libraries is necessarily a bandwagon just because it manifests Web 2.0. Are Information Commons a bandwagon phenomenon? Group study areas? Café's in libraries? Or is the issue our concern that our 2.0 initiatives won't be used, or used wisely? John mentions the failure of user-contributed tags in the Ann Arbor District Library catalog because these tags disappoint his expectations. Believe me, I've seen some funny things go on in the group study area just outside my office. But no one is calling this area a failure.

There's no question in my mind that few libraries have done the fundamental recalibrating that John refers to. This will be the biggest challenge set out for us by the major changes in information culture happening all around us. But maybe this is a two-way street. In other words, maybe the slow build-up of new technologies and new physical environments in a library can have an effect on that library's culture. In a couple of John's responses to comments to his posting, he seems to be saying this, and I was glad to see it. I see this happening in my own institution. There are bits and pieces of recalibration going on, and these things are happening due to a variety of forces, some of them external to the library. I've been advocating for more, much more, but this place isn't ready to dig down deep. But there are ideas percolating, and initiatives emerging. I hope we don't stop moving ahead until we've met the ideal criteria for advancement.

I would love to see design thinking applied in my library. Among other things, it would represent my library's commitment to identifying and solving problems in a proven, systematic way. But I wouldn't want us to be limited by design thinking in all that we might do. This is because the introduction of a technology can evolve in unexpected, and unexpectedly useful, ways. You might carefully plan to solve one problem, and another one might be solved along the way. The ball starts rolling, ideas take root, examples emerge, small sparks of interest and even enthusiasm begin to spread. Just think about blogs. They began as "trivial" personal journals, and are now finding their way into the life cycle of serious scholarship.

I think it's important to understand that we can't expect students to envision how every new technology in the library might benefit them. The recent OCLC report Sharing, Privacy and Trust in our Networked World recognized this by showing, for example, that only a small sample of college students surveyed think libraries should build social networking sites. These networks were defined by a number of different features.

Does this mean the end of the road for social networking in academic libraries? Think about it. If we allow student feedback to dictate all our innovations, then the game is over. This particular response would mean that academic librarians will play no visionary, groundbreaking role in the evolution of social scholarship.

This alone is enough to tell me that we need to look beyond student feedback and think more about leadership. No, I'm not saying we should abandon or dismiss student feedback. Of course not. But this is only part of a bigger picture that we need to consider as we recalibrate and design.