1. I'm reading the article by Chip Nilges at http://www.oclc.org/nextspace/002 and am feeling alternately thrilled at the new prospects and form of what a library can be, and exhausted at the thought of having to virtually re-invent my job/career in light of that!
For my elementary library, it could be a very liberating thing to turn my reference budget almost entirely over to reading for pleasure and literacy enhancement--there is so much current information available on-line that I have hesitated to replace many of the standard book-form reference materials. Truthfully, the standard reference volumes just sit on the shelf, and our users' instincts are to go to the Web...truthfully, MY instinct is now to go to the Web! I think our job has changed from helping a student wade through the mighty print tomes, to teaching them to search intelligently on the Web, locate valid, authoritative resources, and use them with proprietary ethics. It is a bit harder for our younger kids, as most of the reference content found easily online is written at a rather high reading level.
One segment of that article discussed OCLC's changes, one of which discusses having non-cataloging professionals--ordinary users! post content to their resources. "...over the next year we are planning to offer a variety of “social” services to allow non-cataloging library professionals, library patrons and others to contribute to and use WorldCat. Services under consideration include tagging, list creation and sharing, citation management, personal cataloging, and the like." I think this is a brilliant move, and I can actually almost foresee an end to the sanctity of the Dewey Decimal System...or is that crazy? When I begin to teach how to search for books on our SIRSI online catalog, I am always frustrated by the limited search terms and how difficult it is to explain to students why some words (usually kid-type words) aren't search terms, so they need to think of synonyms. I am not saying that key-words/synonyms fluency is not valid learning, but just how nice it would be if the online catalog were more user-friendly...interactive, where kids could tag and add their own keywords to favorite series and such so they could find them more easily. My head is spinning from the possibilities!
2. Web 2.0 to me is a revolutionary way of looking at the world. It's almost like a parallel universe where time, distance and space are irrelevant...especially distance and space. It can become all-consuming if a person is not careful, as constant, real-time technology makes personal, private, downtime from being "connected" a more and more rare phenomenon. I personally don't want to be "connected" all the time, and I see so many ad's portray this as a desirable state of being. On the up side I can access any information I need, at any time, with just a few techie devices, a little know-how, and a fee to some communications company. I love that I don't have to leave my house and go to the library and hope they have the journals I need. (Ridiculous! Petersburg Public Library, great as it is, would never have had the materials I need to accomplish a class like this! I would have had to go to Juneau or Seattle to accomplish academic learning!) Instead, I can respond to the questions in these classes sitting by my wood stove, feet up on the sofa, gazing out the windows at the mountains while I formulate my thoughts. The challenge for all of us, and especially for librarians, is to keep it all organized, and to help our patrons learn to separate the wheat from the chaff, to be literate, conscientious, ethical, balanced users. What concerns me is the very human nature to only reach out and accept that which goes along with ones own viewpoint, and with whatever is the easiest to find. Where is the authority, the balance, the verity of information in a user-selected, user-moderated, user-created online world?
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"feeling alternately thrilled at the new prospects and form of what a library can be, and exhausted at the thought of having to virtually re-invent my job/career in light of that!" That is so true. The effort will have many benefits but the effort will be difficult. I think Joyce Valenza is one who is on the way there but I am not convinced that Joyce ever sleeps.... how can she and keep up with all the new stuff going on?? I talked to her at the AASL conference earlier this month and she is so positive and energetic about the needs of your students and how we can engage them using digital media and Web 2.0 but she leaves me exhausted :-)
ReplyDeleteI have come to the conclusion that books that just sit on the shelf and aren't used might as well be bricks in many cases. However, despite the current prevailing thought, not everything is online. At least not necessarily where you can access it. And there is still a place for books in the world. But I do think that we need to start re-evaluating reference as the place for them in the 21st century.
I think that Dewey couldn't have conceived of the digital age, and if he were here, I think his solution to organizing a library would be radically different! One of the things that ASD is looking for in an upgraded library system is interactive search functionality....user tagging and the ability for users to search on those tags that make more sense to them than what a cataloger thinks are sensible subject headings. I think that the social aspects of the web that have been so powerful for everyone have to be reflected in our catalogs if we want them to be relevant to our students at all.
The balance is going to hard to find and is going to continue to shift under us. I think that we are no longer in a world where we can allow ourselves to become as static as libraries have been over the past century. It will be the death of the library if we do.
Ann