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.

Thing #12: Facebook, or How I Learned to Love Throwing Sheep

Facebook is reputed to be the social networking tool of the young and hip, but most of the Facebook users I know are middle-aged like me. In Facebook, as in the rest of life, people of similar age and interests tend to clump together, and so it is that without much active effort I have accumulated a gaggle of Facebook friends in their 30's, 40's, and 50's, who are interested in books, our families, and assorted random goofiness.

Actually I have two Facebook pages-- a personal one and a professional one. I set up the professional page so I could start a Facebook group for teens interested in library events and updates.

I set up the personal page so I could throw sheep at my friends.

Seriously. Most of my Facebook friends--the ones who are actual, you know, FRIENDS, but also some of those who are friends mainly in that we have (here it goes, noun-into-verb alert, wait for it...wait for it...) FRIENDED each other on Facebook--anyway, most of those people who I connected with because our our deep interest in words, books, deep thoughts about life, etc.--well, mainly what we do on Facebook is throw sheep at each other, via a silly little Facebook application called SuperPoke.

I know, I know, you can do all kinds of useful things on Facebook, like sending out mass invitations and updates, and letting people know about your recent blog posts, and putting up photos of your family and friends, and all that cool stuff.

But really you can do much of that stuff via e-mail and blog posts and such, while there is no comparable substitute for a good sheep-throwing free-for-all. And when you get tired of throwing sheep, there are lots of variants, like sending flowers, tripping peole, and even seasonal options such as throwing pumpkin pies, throwing Santa, and throwing Hillary Clinton. It's fun, builds community, and is highly theraputic, too.

So, duck! (Baaaaaaaa!)

Thing #11: Technorati

Maybe it's the season sneaking up on me, but for some reason I have the urge to sing the word "Technorati" to the tune of the Hallelujah chorus:

TECH-no-rati!
TECH-no-rati!
Technorati! Technorati!
Tech-NO-ra-TI!

No? Okay, maybe not.

So, as suggested, I checked out Technorati and learned more about how tags work. As I've mentioned before, I'm a terrible and pathetic tagger, and really have mixed feelings about tagging as a useful tool on a large scale; the universe of natural language is just too big and varied.

But I had fun looking at Technorati's tag clouds, and checking out what's popular and rising these days. Seems to me that Technorati would be an extremely useful tool for writers or pundits who want to keep their finger on the pulse of what's being talked about, and it is helpful if you want to see who's linked to your blog or website lately (I did a few vanity searches and found that some surprising people have linked to a couple of things I've written, so that was neat).

As suggested, I did try searching on "Learning 2.0", and found 7,007 posts that mentioned the term, but only 531 with the "Learning 2.0" tag. Which suggests that many other people are just as lazy about tagging as I am. Good to know!

Thing #10: Mmm, Delicious!

image of chocolates courtesy of freefoto.com

Del.icio.us is yet another one of those things I've been hearing about for years and have finally gotten to explore. And it is, indeed, as cool as everyone said. It's like a portable bookmark list! That you can add to quickly and easily and without even hardly breaking stride, as you surf and slide around the Internet!

Only a couple of problems:

1. Tagging. Tagging is my bete noire. In my non-work online life I never remember to tag: not blog posts, not photos, not gmail messages, not LibraryThing books. This means that when I search for something (say, in my formidable backlog of old gmail messages on my personal email account) I just have to try to remember what words I might have used in the subject heading or contents of the message, and look under those. Sometimes that works great, sometimes not, sometimes it works but I have to sift through pages and pages of results to find what I'm looking for.

I'm guessing it will be the same on del.icio.us, when and if I accumulate a sizeable list of bookmarks: I won't remember to tag, so they'll just be all jumbled, like the papers on my desk, and I'll have to sift and sort and guess to find what I want.

2. Del.icio.us button. This button is part of what makes del.icio.us so cool, because you don't have to stop and cut and paste to add a site to your del.icio.us account: just see a site you like, click, and voila! it's added. Only problem is, the button isn't available on shared computers (like the NVDPL computers), so some of the advantage of using del.icio.us is nullified when I'm using it at work, since in order to add a site I either have to stop, open the del.icio.us site in another window, and then cut and paste and click to add a new site to my account, or else have the forethought to just keep the del.icio.us site open in a separate window whenever I'm on the Internet.

Ah, well; nothing's perfect. And the road to ultimate online transparency is ever strewn with rocks and stones and snares.

In the meantime, the name of this application is making me hungry for dinner. Mmm... dinner!

Thing #9: Exorsising my LibraryThing Demons

Goodness, it's been a while. I was so sure I'd be totally done with all 23 things by now! But I'm finally back, anyway. I think I had a LibraryThing block. I'll explain...

To tell the truth, I've been a member of LibraryThing for almost three years now. I heard of it when it first launched, and in a burst of enthusiasm I ponied up $25.00 for a full lifetime premium membership, enabling me to add as many books to my account as I chose (the free membership only entitles one to catalog a paltry 200 books). I picked a few random books from my collection and cataloged them on my account, astounded at the ease with which LibraryThing spat out the full MARC record on any and every title I typed in, including the most obscure, with just a few keyword clues.

Then... I did nothing. All around me, online friends were cataloging their books and their kids' books and rating and reviewing their books and tagging them and making tag clouds and making connections with other LibraryThing members and and posting their collections on their blogs ... there was, and is, an ENDLESS amount of stuff you could do with LibraryThing.

It was overwhelming.

Anyway, I already had a list of all the books I'd read since 1999: it was handwritten, in a scruffy old spiral notebook, and I kind of boggled at the idea of transferring my records of all 1,000+ books from my beloved book log onto LibraryThing just so that I could put my list online. I mean, sure, adding a few books to a LibraryThing account is easy-peasy, but that much cataloging at once felt too much like...well, like work.

So, LibraryThing has been sort of a guilty barely-started project of mine lo these past three years. Like an Internet version of the scarf I once tried to knit, that ended up buried in the bottom of my teenage closet, a sad little skein of yarn with a few holey knitted rows all stuffed in a wrinkled paper bag.

But now, now I must confront my demons. For my job. So, I opened up LibraryThing again. Dug up my account information, only to discover that my "lifetime" unlimited account seemed to have reverted to basic-member status. Emailed the very kind and friendly LibraryThing staff and got my premium account reinstated.

And today, at long last, I have figured out what I will do with my LibraryThing account: I will use it to keep track of the Readers' Choice award books I read each year. That's nice and clearly defined, and much less scary than thinking I'm going to have to catalog my whole collection, or all the books I've read in the past ten years.


So. I just logged in to LibraryThing and added five Stellar Award nominees: three that I've read, one that I'm reading now, and one that I have checked out and plan to read soon. I'll keep them in my paper book log, too, but it's nice to have made peace with LibraryThing at long last.


Over on the sidebar you'll find some random books from my LibraryThing. Can you tell which ones I added back in 2005 and which are new?

I Made a Comic! (Thing #8: Image Generators)

Okay, this "Make your own comic" generator is extremely cool. I found it on the generator blog, and despite a total lack of drawing expertise, I created this comic strip-style reflection on a book I just read in about 20 minutes.

It was fun! And now I want to do a whole series! But I don't think the "Unshelved" creators have to worry about any competition from me.

Now, if only I could figure out how to copy and paste the comic into this post...

Thing #7: Finding Feeds

The good news is that over the past few weeks I seem to have collected a nice list of blog feeds on my Bloglines account relating to libraries/books/children's & teen literature, and that it's fun, quick, and convenient to check them--they're all in one place, and I can skim the titles and decide which ones I want to read all the way through.

The bad news is that I'm not exactly sure how I amassed the list.

Neither the Bloglines nor the Google nor the Technorati search tools seemed to have a quick, simple way to find a list of library-related blogs, so mostly I found a bunch of blogs I liked and then looked at the sites they linked to. I also subscribed to the Bloglines Quick Picks "Books" package, so now I'm reading the NY Times book reviews and the Globe and Mail arts news on a regular basis.

I have a special soft spot for the book blogs maintained by librarians and other enthusiasts, though. My favorite blog title? Bookshelves of Doom, which focuses on teen literature and also on challenges to books in libraries and schools. Recently she linked to a librarian's thoughtful response to a book challenge. Pretty inspiring.