Thing #15

I've been reading about Library 2.0 and Learning 2.0 for nearly two years or more. I'm finding it impossible to distill even a fraction of the discussion down either internally or in a blog post. Both my initial support of bringing Learning 2.0 and the 23 things to OCL and the great satisfaction I'm enjoying as the first OCL 23 things project draws to the end, reinforce my stong opinion that Library 2.0 offers a great deal for the conceptual planning of the future of public libraries.

I followed each of the suggestion links for further reading about Library 2.0 in Thing #15 and made many del.icio.us tags after reading. One point that seems to come from one of my own unexpressed thoughts was about user education in Away from Icebergs. "We need to focus our efforts not on teaching research skills but on eliminating the barriers that exist between patrons and the information they need, so they can spend as little time as possible wrestling with lousy search interfaces and as much time as possible actually reading and learning. Obviously, we’ll help and educate patrons when we can, and when they want us to, and the more we can integrate our services with local curricula, the better. But if our services can’t be used without training, then it’s the services that need to be fixed—not our patrons. "

For now, I'll keep it simple with Sarah Houghton's Library 2.0 definition quoted in 11 reasons why Library 2.0 exists and matters, it is "interactive, collaborative, and driven by community needs."