MLibrary 2.0 : Jessamyn West

Jessamyn West
Metafilter.com Moderator, Library Consultant, http://librarian.net/

handouts, notes, slides

Digital Natives – “Born with the Chip” – but most of us are digital immigrants. Trying to think about what we do for people who’ve grown up in a network world.
It’s not that don’t know how computers work – it’s other things.
But, we’re stuck with really big solutions for really big libraries – this is a problem for smaller libraries.
Today’s talk: generally directions. Philosophical stuff!
2.0 helps me stay professionally connected and professionally involved.
Library 2.what?? Again, people don’t know what they heck it is.
Important buzzwords: usability, AJAX, … 2.0 is a buzzword, and it’s important to know what it is so you don’t pay for stuff that isn’t really something original.
Web 2.0. Termed by O’Reilly to name a conference. Represents interactivity. Library 2.0 is like obscenity – “I don’t know what it is, but I know it when I see it.”
IT IS: service model with user-centered change.
DATA is rich on websites: hit counts, etc. Not so much with 2.0 tools. You have to explain its utility because you can’t back it up with numbers.
You need to make your services findable and usable – the ILL example – patron complains the we don’t have X book, but thy don’t know about ILL or purchase requests.
Problem: trying and failing publicly, and that feels weird. DON’T BE AFRAID TO TRY SOMETHING. The more experimenting, the more okay it is to experiment.
Katrina: go to where users are. ALA went in and repaired homes. Librarians working. Make links with people.
Data silo: we buy content from people, and now we can’t connect it to our other content. It’s important to have permanent links to our stuff. Get data to be OPEN so you can use it.
PACE University: links to public library.
Recognize usability.
Have a PERSON working there. Give library services a personality.
Interfaces should be something users are used to.
AADL is a compromise between PennTags and traditional OPACs.
Make it seem like something everything can do.
Awesome Resources group in Facebook.
SAVE THE TIME OF THE USER: we can’t do it all so they can do nothing! There are certain things we just can’t do – where are the lines? “Maybe we need to think about…” should be the approach.
THE MENU IDEA for BI.
Library 2.0 is not a religion: yo’re not either on or off. You move towards it. Not “more 2.0 than you”.

Q&A

Q: What are 1 or 2 cool things online.
A: Cool and effective? KSU librarian has a blog, and is 2nd life – one of the roles of the librarian is to just jump in and say, “Who’s With me?” Using it as an intranet – working with colleagues. Internet Archive is thinking about this too – they’re now classified as a library, so they get library grants. Working on a BIG Union Catalog of Wiki’s.

Q: How do you see this relating to Information Literacy? It seems like it’s .. not opposed .. but
A: Being literacy is different now. “It’s all on Google” falls apart. There’s a different understanding of the web now. So, critical thinking becomes the biggest next step – how to evaluate, filter, sort. Intermediate tools can be picked up: searching, etc. But you need help with the other stuff: the evaluation. Digital natives know how to interact, but not how to evaluate that interaction.