Library 2.0

[Sigh.] I have so many thoughts on Library 2.0. I read several of the essays listed in the 23Things posting for this exercise.

My thoughts run so many ways when it comes to this topic. One first thought is that "library as museum" is a key concept that is often too readily dismissed. Human artifacts, such as books and other tangible media, are part and parcel of the domain of libraries. While I firmly believe that the digital format will eventually become the default, libraries are THE institution in which all remaining hard copy objects MUST remain accessible IN ADDITION to our involvement in the digital domain. Just as museums retain physical objects, such as examples of extinct animals, minerals with their origins noted, pottery from bygone eras, and so on, one thing libraries are is book museums. This is critical, too, because, aside from that, more books are published now than ever before, and their format is not incidental.

This brings me to another sticking point for me. Now, I have gone from cataloging to scholarly communications, so I have not paid too much attention to the first version of RDA, but my concern is that cataloging's focus needs to shift from "content over carrier" to the exact opposite: "carrier over content." The CARRIER of an item is the absolutely critical aspect to a patron. It sure is critical to this library patron, to me. If I have to go to the library to get an item, I need to know that front and center. If I can get something online, right now, that is very important for me to know.

In a roundabout way, this leads me to another issue which is inadequately addressed in discussions of Library 2.0 and that is: who pays for all of this stuff? It's great to say that the online environment affords access to this, that and everything else, but my employer can only justify paying for resources that directly serve our particular academic community, and we will continue to have limited access (via interlibrary loan, for instance) to additional materials. My thoughts are that the whole -economic infrastructure- of Library 2.0 in the Web 2.0 (and beyond) environment, is what needs to be hashed out -above all-.

As some of the essayists pointed out, yes, we need to have library workers in place who are extremely technologically facile; that is a given at this point. As one essayist said, we also need to react -quickly- to changing technological capabilities. That's where we could stand some improvement.

My dream is to be able to go to any library catalog and have a super powerful search mechanism in place so that I can search for article titles in the same place that I search for book titles, and have the ability to search by subject, date, place, etc. This can be achieved by major manipulation of the rich metadata/catalog records that are already in place for so many items (books, images, sound recordings, articles, etc.), so that tons of work is done behind the interface of the catalog. The catalog interface should hide a hugely complex network of information that leads users to any sort of library resource they want, a la Uber-Google.

This is such an exciting time to be in libraries.

The changing landscape of contemporary cataloging