Perspectives on Library 2.0

I read all of the perspectives on Library 2.0, and found Dr. Wendy Schulz's "To a temporary place and time" resonated with me the most. She looked at the big picture of Library 2.0 and beyond, and her vision of Library 4.0 as a knowledge spa is very appealing!

I find it surprising that in "Away from Icebergs", Rick Anderson says that at University of Nevada, Reno, the circulation has dropped 55% over 12 years. That certainly is not the experience at NVDPL! I agree that we need to continue to work at eliminating the barriers that exist between library patrons and the information they need. His line "if our services can’t be used without training, then it’s the services that need to be fixed—not our patrons" is a very valid point.

What does Library 2.0 mean to me? Well, I would say it means that we accept the fact that change is constant, and we need to create libraries that are as user-friendly as possible. As librarians, we need programs like Learning 2.0 to keep us up-to-date with what is going on out there in the online world, and we also need to take it upon ourselves to try to stay as current as possible.

To me, the key concept here is connectivity.

Continuing the piggie theme...

Social Networking

I had a look at MySpace and Facebook, but I'm still not interested in creating an account with either one of them. As for MySpace, the music part does interest me. I looked up Eskimo Joe, an Aussie band, and Sarah Harmer and Kathleen Edwards, two Canadian indie artists. I could hear live music, see a YouTube video, could read their blogs, see how to contact them, and so on. For the more unknown groups that don't have websites, this would be a good way to keep up to date with their latest tours, tracks, etc. However, for any artist that had a website, I would much rather go there first.

DeskSet was what I expected.

In Facebook, I searched under Dagmar and came up with over 500 people that matched. Of course to look at their pages, I would have to register, which I won't do, so that was that. I have looked at the NVDPL Facebook page before as well.

So, I would have to say I would look at MySpace again, but as for Facebook, it can go on without me!

Wednesday's Wildlife Photo

Technorati

Spent time exploring Technorati today. I can see its appeal. Being able to search by tags really narrowed down the results lists when I was trying to find blogs on "learning 2.0" - 164 posts instead of 8467 results in the all blog posts search. For fun, I tried the same search in Google (blogs) and had over 58,000 results.
I wasn't very interested in the blogs that were the most popular ones. Both ones chosen by the authority and fans weren't really ones I cared about, but I guess it is good to know what is popular. When I have more time, I'll keep learning about Technorati!

Del.icio.us

Spent time playing on Del.icio.us. As the layout is not that user friendly, I had not used it in the past. Now that I understand how it works, and the social component, I will definately use it. I created an account too!

Wednesday's wildlife photo