Thursday, August 2, 2007

Week 6, Thing 15

So I just watched the YouTube video about Web 2.0 (located here) and wow. Just wow. Totally mag. Compelling, informative, beautifully done.

I read several of the articles in the discovery resources, and it struck me how much potential there is for making the library a truly interactive place. In The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova (It's about Dracula, but that's beside the point, and I didn't care for it, though many apparently did.) you can see the steps one had to go through to do research only 60 years ago. The students literally has to ask the librarian for what he needed, then have it brought to him, then give it back to be put away when he was finished. Now, anyone who has an internet connection has the world's information at their fingertips. It's a mind blowing concept. The modern library, of course, isn't so proprietary of its materials as the research libraries of former times; our patrons are free to browse the stacks, taking what they wish off the shelves themselves (though we still like to put it back ourselves), but we're still stuck with some of those antiquated mentalities.

We need to keep these musty tomes. What if someone needs them?
Chances are, they probably won't. If they haven't been checked out since 1986, what are the odds someone will need them tomorrow, or even 50 tomorrows from now? The information is probably on the web somewhere. We're pack rats. Just look at some of our offices and cubicles. We lean toward the pack rat in our collections as well. We'll weed straight fiction when it doesn't circ, so why are we so stingy when it comes to weeding nonfic? If anything, that's where we should be weeding! The information in our nonfic is all over the web. Focus on establishing good online resources for patron, then teach them how to use it. Most of our patrons prefer to do research online anyway.

The online catalog is just an e-version of the old card catalog.
Why, when it could be so much more? Our patrons can look up a book, see where it is, see if it's checked out, and even put a hold on it. Why shouldn't they be able to submit a review of it? Make comments about it? Dialogue with other patrons about it right there on the item's page? Tag it? We should make our catalogs into places where people come not only to find a book they know they want, but to discover which books they want after that. I love Amazon's "Customers who searched for...also expressed interest in" feature. Customer driven book lists and recommendations not only will help our patrons find new things, but cost us virtually nothing. Once the technology is in place, it basically runs itself.

Don't get me wrong. There's still a place for the brick and mortar library, the paper and ink book, and the flesh and blood librarian. The key is finding our place in this virtual world, and learning how to not only provide services for our patrons, but to collaborate with them to make the library a more enriched and accessible place.

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