Library 2.0: Connectivity, Flexibility, and Addition
For those not Learning & Playing along with the rest of CML, one of this week’s tasks was to ruminate on “Library 2.0“.
As the post on the Learn and Play blog indicates, Library 2.0 is different things to different people. To me there are three essential concepts.
The first is Connectivity. The idea that libraries and their customers and their communities are all linked, communicating, and sharing in both directions. Libraries to customers and customers to libraries. This communication helps the library to be attuned to the needs of the community and responsive to them. Libraries also need to be farming the intellectual capital of their communities, organize it, and reflect it back to its community.
The second is Flexibility. Libraries need to be open to the idea of change and renewal. The need to be willing to act on the information with connectivity affords and produce products and services that utilize it while improving their existing services.
The third is Addition. In my view, Library 2.0 is an additive model. It is new of layers of new possibilities on top of what already exists. We cannot afford to heedlessly dismiss the past becasue we want to move in a new direction. Instead, you use the past as a foundation for the future. In a library example, you don’t get rid of Interlibrary Loan service because you add a huge new e-book collection. One is not a replacement for the other, merely a supplement.
