I found John Blyberg’s post, Library 2.0 Debased, very interesting and in many ways, a breath of fresh air. I agree with him on a lot of levels. I agree that mistakes have been made. I think there has been a lot of confusing rhetoric about Library 2.0. I think a lot of people lost touch with what their patrons actually needed and wanted and started implementing cool technologies because they thought that was what Library 2.0 was about. I think the only thing we really disagree on is Library 2.0 actually has a single coherent definition.
Anyone who’s read my blog or has been to one of my talks where I mention Library 2.0 knows that I have always been uncomfortable with the label. I always felt like the 2.0 label and bandwagon wasn’t productive and that it would end up leading to more confusion and navel-gazing than anything else. I was right and wrong, I think. Perhaps it was because of the Library 2.0 bandwagon that the Learning 2.0 movement exists now. That is something useful and concrete that has exposed thousands of librarians to social technologies who may never have gotten that experience. I think the 2.0 meme gave Learning 2.0 the traction it needed to get implemented in so many libraries. Could it have happened without Library 2.0? Perhaps. Hard to say.
But still, I think the movement has had some negative impact as well, and that is due, largely, to a lack of a clear conception of what 2.0 is and how one can get there. It has confused and alienated a lot of people. When you have something as amorphous as Library 2.0, it can be interpreted in so many ways. Some people see it as being all about technology. Some see it more as a service philosophy. Others see it more about organizational change. Who is right? Who is wrong? Who gets to define it?
Library 2.0 is a term with myriad definitions, and it’s no wonder that people ended up defining it in ways that others didn’t agree with. Trying to capture the essence of Library 2.0 is like trying to capture the wind. I still don’t understand what Library 1.0 looks like, so I have a hard time understanding exactly what 2.0 might look like. No matter what the definition, though, when you start hearing people say that every library should have a blog, you know things have gone too far and that folks have lost site of the goal: to do right by our patrons.
I think Library 2.0 led to a lot of librarians losing their way and you can see that in the huge number of library blogs, Flickr account and MySpace pages that haven’t been updated in months or years. It’s valuable to know how to use this stuff, but the focus should never be on the tools. Never. I know they’re fun to play with and it’s exciting to see the cool things other libraries have done with them, but that shouldn’t impact whether you use the technology or not. We should always be focused on our patrons’ needs. Not every library needs a public-facing blog. Not everyone has a population that wants to read news about the library or book reviews. Not everyone has a population that wants to have a dialog with the library. Unless you see a real need that could be filled by a blog, your library does not need a blog.
What I always hoped to see come out of the Library 2.0 movement is exactly what never did. I wanted to see a greater culture of assessment in libraries. Are you doing more assessment than you did before? If so, bravo! But I don’t hear people talking much about assessment, which makes me think that Library 2.0 hasn’t impacted that area enough. And yet, I can’t think of anything more integral to Library 2.0. How can we know what our patrons need and want if we’re not doing assessment?
I also wanted to see more value placed on technology learning and implementation, and that happened to some extent. I think it’s great that many library administrators gave their staff time for Learning 2.0, but there are so many libraries where all learning has to go on at home (and while I love this profession, it shouldn’t consume your life). I was at an academic library a while back where the staff were complaining that administration wanted them to implement all this 2.0 stuff, but expected them to do it on top of all their regular duties. I wonder 1) how they’re supposed to accomplish that and 2) how enthusiastically they will implement social software tools under those circumstances. By not giving people time to learn on the job and to work with these emerging technologies, staff end up feeling like their administrators are only paying lip service to Library 2.0 and Web 2.0.
I’ve tried to define Library 2.0 for myself. I see it as:
- Working to meet changing user needs – get to know your users and non-users, develop a culture of assessment, examine any and all assumptions about how services and systems should “be”, visiting other libraries and remembering what it is to be a patron, and then changing once you’ve figured it all out.
- Believing in our users – trusting them, listening to them, giving them a role in helping to define library services for the future
- Getting rid of the culture of perfect – being able and willing to experiment, learning from failure, being agile as an organization, continuously improving services based on feedback rather than working behind the scenes for ages to create the “perfect” product or service
- Being aware of emerging technologies and opportunities – looking for partnerships in your community or with other libraries, being aware of library and technology trends, giving staff time to try out new technologies and learn
- Looking outside of the library world for applications, opportunities, inspiration – understanding the culture of the technologies and how they are used by the public, seeing how technologies are implemented in non-profit and for-profit institutions
Of course, if you asked me what any good library should be doing, you’d get that same list. The fact is, this isn’t exactly revolutionary. And good librarians have embraced these ideas for decades and decades. We have always had librarians who are change oriented and those who are change-averse. We still do. This is probably where I get stuck, because it makes it hard for me to figure out what Library 1.0 would be.
I gave a keynote on Library 2.0 that is posted on YouTube. The fact is, what I was really talking about for an hour is what I think libraries should be like. So is Library 2.0 just about being a good librarian and creating a good library? For me, I guess it is.
I really don’t blame the vendors for jumping on the 2.0 bandwagon with tagging, RSS and whatnot. We’ve been bugging them for years to integrate tagging and RSS and now that they’ve done it, we’re going to complain that they’re paying lip service to 2.0 or are co-opting it? Sure, they could have integrated many of these features more intelligently, but we didn’t do it so great the first time around either (see John’s comment on his former library’s catalog tagging failure. I only hope our patrons are more forgiving of our 2.0 foibles than we are of our vendors.). My Discoveries from Medialab is the first technology specific to libraries I’ve seen get the social stuff right. While each library has its own instance of My Discoveries (a social tagging and review platform) on AquaBrowser, all reviews and tags go into a central repository of all comments and tags from all My Discoveries libraries. So you end up with a much bigger pool of data that will be much more valuable to users in the catalog (and having a lot of tags will make it more likely that other people will start tagging). You can even pre-populate your catalog with tags from LibraryThing. This is a huge step in the right direction and it came from a vendor, not from us.
I did an assessment recently of our distance learners here, and what they wanted had very little to do with Library 2.0. They didn’t want more participation. They didn’t want to see photos of what we’re up to here. Other than the few who wanted 24/7 reference services, most of them wanted the library to be invisible. They didn’t want to have to log into the library. They didn’t want to have to search multiple databases. They didn’t want to learn new systems. And they wanted us to have more full-text articles available online so they didn’t have to use interlibrary loan. Basically, they wanted to be self-sufficient and not to have to deal with us. And who can blame them? A library for online students is a means to an end. They just want to get the resources they need in the shortest amount of time so they can get their research done. The easier and more seamless we can make it for them, the happier they will be. The most “2.0” thing we’ve done is embedded a customized library presence for distance learners in their course management system. Not as sexy as Facebook, but it makes access for them a lot more seamless and it’s exactly where they want the library to be.
I love Rochelle Hartman’s very level-headed assessment of her forays into the 2.0 universe:
I’ve been in and out of the 2.0 stream for awhile. It was like a life preserver when I first grabbed hold of it several years ago, after feeling like I’d been dog paddling far too long. I needed something to re-engage me, to keep me interested, to make me feel relevant. It was a the perfect flotation device. Eventually, I threw off my floaty, went into the deep end and became an enthusiastic supporter of all things 2.0. Then, I left my reference librarian position and became a reference library manager. I was tossing out 2.0 at my new colleagues like beads at Mardi Gras (if I may abandon the water metaphor). Some of it stuck and has become a seamless part of how we work, like Meebo IM. There’s a gaming program here that’s the purview of Teen services. It’s regularly scheduled, well attended and means a great deal to a miniscule and static portion of our users (you know, like book clubs).
After about six months in my position, I was able to step back, breathe, and realize that 2.0 in the tech sense was not a service priority for adult reference or, really, for the community we serve. We deployed Flickr, a blog, MySpace, even a YouTube account, most of which ended up being inexpensive experiments that had zero impact in any direction. On the other hand, our internet access is probably one of the least restrictive I’ve heard about in a library environment and I love that our IT folks understand that it’s crucial to be responsive. At any given moment, I’d guess that 70% of our public access terminals are being used for social networking: MySpace, various IM clients, Runescape, eBay, etc. Our help or involvement is not needed or welcomed (unless time is about to run out and a patron wants an extension). Those folks don’t want to interact with us. They don’t want us in their space.
Mistakes will always be made. If a library doesn’t have any failures, then they’re probably not doing enough to change. But the focus should always be on the users we have, not the users we read about in Educause or Wired or the ones at the libraries that are successfully implementing all sorts of social tools. It’s important to be up on the trends, but you can’t rely on studies like that to tell you what you need to do with your users. Assessment may not be sexy, but it’s critical to making the library reflect the needs and wants of its patrons. I know libraries can feel like technology is passing them by when they see all this cool stuff other libraries are doing, but if you’re focused on the needs and wants of your service population (including people in your community who don’t use the library), you shouldn’t worry.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that I think the Library 2.0 movement itself is to blame for a lot of the not-so-well-thought-out technology implementations we’ve seen out there. There hasn’t been enough focus on assessment, on knowing our users, and on really understanding the cultures of these online communities/tools we’re getting ourselves into. Instead, the focus has been more on the cool thing that Ann Arbor, or Hennepin, or UPenn, or some other really cool library has done and the big study that tells us that __% of users are doing cool things with social software (whose users?). So it’s not shocking that people have gotten confused. I think every blogger, writer and speaker who discusses Library 2.0, social software, etc. should ask themselves if they focus enough on assessment and understanding each individual library’s population before jumping into this stuff (or if they only focus on the tools). Because, if we’re not doing that, we’re doing people a grave disservice.
Spot on once again, Meredith. I never quite grasped the 1.0/2.0 divide as I always thought it was about being a good librarian, not just trumpeting the software of the moment.
It’s a lesson I see every day in the corporate library world. There may always be someone who has to be spoonfed information, but the majority of my clients want to have the ability to easily navigate our information resources themselves. As the librarian, I’m here to take on their mega-impossible research projects, but I’m also here to enable their ability to handle the day-to-day stuff. If new gadgets provide me with a seamless, embedded presence, then I’m all for trying them out at work. But a lot of them haven’t worked that way. Does it make me less of a 2.0? Only if I wasn’t doing my job well!
Dan
I really appreciate your view of this situation as being one of managing change rather than of adopting technology. Thank you.
I’m not sure if it will be a good example, but allow me to draw up an analogy. When I was in library school eight years ago, I’d been given a project in the library where I was working as a student assistant that involved entering information on CD-ROM publications into a separate database (not the OPAC, mind you). The intent was for users to search this separate database and then request the CD-ROM by an index number from behind the circulation desk, where they were shelved. These CD-ROMs have probably been sitting on that same shelf for the past seven years, and I may very well have been the last person to touch them.
My point is that the librarians I was studying under and working for had developed what they thought was a forward-thinking, innovative project, but was really just a project intended to make them feel good about themselves and how forward-thinking they were. There was precious little thought given to patron needs or wants (or even convenience, in this case). Perhaps many of the abandoned library Flickr photostreams and Facebook profiles are the contemporary equivalent of such a project. Yes, it’s important to value the day-to-day work you do, but it is not as important as the patron’s wants and needs. Really, nothing else is as important as that. I think “do you know the patrons’ wants and needs?” should go up on the wall next to Ranganathan’s laws.
The work and research done by the library assessment and evidence based librarianship circles existed long before the library 2.0 frenzy. Yes, if we must still discuss library 2.0, it should be about users and not about technolust or “I found it first so I win”. However, if we start seeing claims library 2.0 was the catalyst for the good work of those movements, it will be unbearable and add even more credence to the “who are these library 2.0 people and do they really know what is going on in librarianship” discourse.
See the most recent ARL SPEC Kit for an overview of how strong library assessment had become — this has everything to do with the leadership of ARL and the good folks behind LibQUAL.
Hey Anonymous, I’m well-aware that assessment and EBP have existed for a very long time and that, in certain areas, are a high priority. But that isn’t the case in every library, especially those outside of the ARL. What I said was that I hoped Library 2.0 would lead to an increased emphasis on assessment. Frankly though, if the Library 2.0 movement did lead to a greater emphasis on assessment, I wouldn’t complain and I can’t imagine anyone else would either. Why would it matter where it came from, so long as people were more focused on it?
Very glad to hear it. As you are well-aware, some of the library 2.0 distancing that librarians are doing is motivated by the silly “we were the first, and still the only ones, thinking of library users” dialogue. This piece has leanings of sounding like library 2.0 made library assessment happen – at least to my eyes. That would have been an unfortunate claim. Happy to hear your clarification.
Meredith,
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.
The problem is not Web 2.0..I mean Library 2.0. It’s all the jumper on-ers that are looking for a simple fix or a quick way to impress that have tried to make it something more than it is.
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 …
Well said, John. While that focus on tools has always been there, I really think we need to focus more on what libraries as organizations need to look like in order to face the challenges of the present and future. Most libraries as they are currently structured are not up to it, as I showed in the example of the administrators who wanted their staff to do “2.0” tech stuff without teaching them anything or giving them extra time or hiring staff. Sigh…
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. 🙂
Dahlia, I think a lot of librarians have felt pressured to implement these tools because they didn’t want their library to be seen as being behind. And I think a lot of the reason for that was the rhetoric they were hearing from bloggers, writers, speakers, etc. However, I agree with you that people are responsible for their own bad choices and that social tools have amazing potential when used to fill a real need. I’ve certainly seen that.
BTW, on a totally unrelated topic, Dahlia is one of my very favorite names. 🙂
I think the Library 2.0 name, in retrospect, has been helpful in getting people to talk about looking at public (mostly) library service in a new way. Or, more precisely, what was a new way for many libraries and librarians.
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.
Dale, I LOVE those examples! Who needs user tagging and reviews in the catalog when you can just put them in the book! I would bet that people would be more likely to write it on extra pages in the book than in the catalog just because the book is right in front of them. Those are such great examples of doing things a little bit differently to serve the unique needs of your service population. Excellent! Thank you so much for sharing. I’ve always known that this stuff had been happening for a long time and wasn’t invented by my generation of librarians. 🙂
Thanks for this; it was very interesting and thought provoking. There was a lot that I wanted to say, both to agree and disagree, so rather than write an essay here, it’s over at http://tinyurl.com/25ccxk if you’d care to take a look. 🙂
Thanks for the timely article. Our Electronic Resources Group, yes we committe everything, is in the process of reviewing our direction with the whole 2.0 thing. I too would like to see assessment of services become a regular part of our conversations with our community. Is it time to bring back the old suggestion box by the door?
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.
Show me a library catalog that is usable both unto itself and as an integral part of the library website, and I’ll agree that there is a library that’s ready to move into other, newer areas of technology to serve users.
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.
I like to go back to the original source when trying to make sense of trends and buzzwords like “2.0”. In this case I’m thinking of Tim O’Reilly’s “What is Web 2.0” at http://www.oreillynet.com/lpt/a/6228 . For me, a one of the key passages is this: “One of the key lessons of the Web 2.0 era is this: Users add value. But only a small percentage of users will go to the trouble of adding value … via explicit means. Therefore, Web 2.0 companies set inclusive defaults for aggregating user data and building value as a side-effect of ordinary use of the application.”
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!
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