#15 Library 2.0 & Web 2.0

What an amazing world we are moving towards. I am old enough to remember card catalogues, reverse brown's filing systems and photo charging plus the gradual introduction and change to computer technology. I must admit I feel a bit like one of the people Alvin Toffler talked about in Future Shock plus I can see elements of Brave new world in some of the articles which are in the batch of OCLC articles.
I liked the fact that the author of Into a new world of Librarianship talked about not buying technology simply for the sake of technology. I think Libraries have to be very careful that they are using technology because it will enhance our services and be useful for our customers not because it's wizz bang and hey aren't we better than everyone else because we have this.
He also said we need to have face to face as well as virtual conversations which I think is very important. Yes we do need to and are reaching out to users who don't want or need to come to a physical building but we also need to maintain those physical spaces and places where people can makes contact other wise we move towards some of the worst excesses of the brave new world model. We still need to have programs which are physical not virtual - I'm afraid I can't quite imagine a virtual preschool storytime!

He talked about the need to give staff time to play and learn and I think this is vital. We are all hurrying and racing to keep up with technology plus trying to maintain current services and be everything to everyone. There must be a balance between what new services we want to provide and what current services we continue to offer. Continually adding without reassessing the time commitment leads to staff who are stressed and skimming across the top of the information they are trying to absorb without really taking it all in.
As we value customers so we also need to value staff and makes sure they have the time to provide the best service for the community.

Many of the aspects of web 2.0 will be very useful for our customers. As a Youth Services Librarian I have noticed in the last few years that they number of non-fiction titles borrowed, particularly by secondary students, has decreased as they become more reliant on the internet for their information. We can use technology to assist their searching and certainly things like library link Victoria are helping with this plus all our on line data bases. We can certainly make sure that the searches they do provide information that is authoritative and it should be one of our aims to do this.
I hope the libraries of the future will still have a physical space and that there will still be books to read as well as virtual spaces and e books because I think it would be sad if those community meeting spaces disappeared. My hope is that the 2 can coexist together.