Thing #13: Library 2.0...version 1.0

Well. I have a LOT to say about Library 2.0. Maybe too much to fit in a blog post. I read the articles listed on the 23 Things page, and clicked over to a few of the links, and eventually found this 2006 article by Walt Crowley, in which he attempts to sort through all the writing and thinking and discussions on the topic. His survey is pretty impressive, and he seems to come away from it with the sense that people are using the term "Library 2.0" to mean pretty much whatever they want, but that overall it has to do with use of social networking software and how that affects libraries.

I tend to be skeptical when people talk about impending sweeping changes to any widespread institution, like libraries or schools. It's not that I don't like change, or that I don't recognize that it happens; it's more that change of the kind the Library 2.0 pundits are writing about is usually limited by the budget and human resources of the institution: people--both employees and the public--are not going to adapt to an entire new set of skills or attitudes instantaneously, and change, when it comes, tends to sort of creep up on you until you turn around and realize that things are quite different than they were a generation ago.

Here's an example, from the last wave of the technological revolution: when I started working in libraries, in 1990, I was a clerk (like an LAII). One of my jobs was to place holds for people: if they wanted to reserve a book, they had to look it up in the online catalogue, write down some information about the title and themselves on a Reserve Slip, and then I entered it into the computer for them. When the hold arrived at the library, they'd get an automated phone call or a computer-generated notice in the mail. (This system had been implemented before I started, but there were many employees who remembered having to phone each patron to let them know their holds were in.) When the patron came to pick up their hold, we would pull it from the Hold Shelf and check it out for them.

I remember when the online system was upgraded to allow patrons to place their own holds on the public computers. Suddenly, we needed twice as many hold shelves! People placed many more holds when they were empowered to do it themselves.

A few years later, by the time I started library school in 1995, the library had its own website, and patrons could place holds from their home computers, receive email notices, pick up their own books from the hold shelves, and check them out themselves from self-checkout terminals. Much more autonomy for the patrons, much less need for intervention or assistance from library employees. And yet there was still plenty of work: since so many people had such open access to the library, they were placing even more holds than before.

There was lots of anxiety among library people around that time: would libraries as we knew them become obsolete? Were we library-school students being trained for a profession that had no future? Were we the buggy-whip makers of the late 20th century?

As it turned out, no. The Internet revolution happened, sure, and it swept libraries along with it. But the basic shape of libraries has remained the same, despite predictions to the contrary. As with the book reserves example above, the shape of what we do has changed in some ways-- less calling to notify patrons and entering hold information for them, and more database instruction, printer troubleshooting, and handing out of temporary Internet slips--but what library users want from us is pretty much the same: help finding stuff, and suggestions about good things to read (and listen to, and watch) and ways to search for information.

I don't see that changing much in the face of Web 2.0. We'll respond to its demands as patron interest and library resources dictate, whether that be a library presence in Second Life, classes in blogging and Flickr, more responsive online catalogue software (that would be my vote!), and/or other methods that haven't even appeared on the horizon yet. But though the shape of the library may stretch and change, I don't think it's going to be demolished and rebuilt anytime soon.