The point is reinforced in a list of criteria for 2.0 companies at the end of the article: “Trusting users as co-developers / Harnessing collective intelligence / Leveraging the long tail through customer self-service…”

Nothing in there about assessment per se, though assessment is certainly important. Certainly some technology dependencies are included, but it’s not just about technology.

I think that if librarians view their users as needy objects of service, and not as “co-developers” who can add value (via explicit or implicit means), we aren’t getting the point of “2.0″.

p.s. I love Dale’s post. This was indeed 2.0 before there was 2.0 — 2.0 without the technology. It’s just that the technology opens up so many new opportunities!

Until more than 5% of libraries get even the most basic Library 1.0 apps right, those pushing the 2.0 agenda should be ashamed.

We still have books on the shelves with reviews pasted in them, mostly pre-WW2 and still read by that generation. There’s alot to be said for keeping depth in a collection.

I personally think “customer-focused library” is a better way to describe this, but then we would have been lost before we even agreed on the word “customer”.

At a library in which I worked in the early 1980s, the director (in her 70s at that time) had for years assessed the community, formally and informally. We bought popular materials. We assigned our own call numbers, not blindly using those assigned by another library (including, to respond to local demand, a system of classifying classic fiction in the literature section, along with criticism of the author and biographies of the author–with one copy in fiction). Imagine–2 copies of a book with 2 different call numbers to make things easier for customers! We also clipped reviews and glued them in books (which customers loved) and encouraged customers to write brief reviews on a page tipped into the book. None of that involves technology, but it all encourages a feeling of community at the library and responded to real need and interest of the library users.

BTW, on a totally unrelated topic, Dahlia is one of my very favorite names.

For me, the whole Library 2.0 movement has really led me to think a lot about how libraries need to be structured for the future and what attitudes need to change. We can’t go on staffing libraries the same way we did before and doing planning the way we did.

While there’s a lot of change work ahead for all of us, I’m optimistic and excited about the future of libraries.

There has always been the rush to (or push by administrations) to do something just because it’s new. Just look to the noise surrounding Information Commons (to pick just one example) awhile back.

The bottom line is any “not-so-well-thought-out … implementations” that doesn’t take the needs of the users into consideration or provide a mechanism for evaluation reflects on the implementors not the tool.

Tools have functions and when used appropriately …

Very nice post. I think much of the confusion centers around peoples interpretation of the term “Library 2.0″ as a sequel to, or the next version of library service. In an ideal world, we might be able to set it aside and collectively decide that we will now refer to this discussion as “foo”, because the label “2.0″ itself may, indeed, have fallen from grace. I think people really want to grok Library 2.0 within a Platonistic context, when it’s really just a way to earmark an ongoing discussion about the future of library service. Insomuch as the L2 discussion is real and the things that have come out of it are concrete manifestations of those discussions, yes, Library 2.0 is an empowered term. So I think the debate over the term itself is fruitless–it’s sort of like debating whether a foot-ladder becomes a stool if you sit on it. I care way more about what the term represents than the term itself but it’s what we’ve been using, so I’ll continue to use it until the discussion evolves beyond it. Which it is sure to do.

I wrote my post because I was seeing that discussion devolve and become very tool-centric as you point out. I was noticing that too much of what we were hearing neglected the logistics of fundamental library service–you know, books and knowledge, and how to actually get real ideas from one head to another (That’s what we do, right? I mean, the physical stuff like books and computers are just an interim step). I just don’t think we need any more conceptual musings over the importance of Second Life, MySpace, and Facebook in the cosmic scheme of things. That’s not to say that there isn’t tremendous value in Web 2.0. No–in fact, Web 2.0 marks a historical moment in human development. It has changed how we understand and relate to information profoundly and permanently while managing to make the consumption of it an experience that is sharply human. We can’t brute-force our way into believing that libraries will remain unaffected by that. Rather, it presents us with a fresh new set of responsibilities that nobody else is going to fulfill. That should be the impetus for us to reevaluate how we do business in what is certain to be a dramatically different information landscape. So I’m saying that we start from the ground up and organize our libraries so that we can practically address the needs of the future.