Michael Stephens of Tame the Web was moderator for the first morning session in the Web 2.0 and Library 2.0 track, introducing a panel of Phil Bradley, Paul Miller and Brian Kelly. Phil gave a comprehensive and no-nonsense introduction to Web 2.0 technologies and commented on the extent to which "2.0" has proliferated, mentioning education 2.0 and learning 2.0, Danny Quah having earlier made reference to journalism 2.0 on his keynote speech. If librarians aren't already blogging, they need to, he said, and a running gag in this session were jokes at Brian Kelly's expense on his alleged failure to have a blog. In his defence, Brian pointed out that he did in fact have one, though devoted to rapper sword dancing, rather than information issues. One of the advantages of Web 2.0, Phil pointed out, is that most services can be used by librarians quickly and without the need for intervention by technicians or IT services departments.
Paul Miller, Technology Evangelist at Talis, then spoke on Library 2.0, a concept only a little over year old, the phrase having been coined by Michael Casey in September 2005. He proudly showed us the results of Talis's Mashing up the library competition, including the fascinating Second Life Library. He thought the drivers for Library 2.0 were the falling costs of digital storage and computing power, growing connectivity, camera 2.0, commoditisation and what he described as the three Os: open source, open data and open APIs. Library 2.0 creates an architecture of participation. He referred to a new, open source, library management system, Pines-Evergreen, developed in Georgia in the USA. Why do libraries pay to give their data to someone else? We must liberate data, or users will desert us.
Brian Kelly spoke on overcoming organisational resistance to introducing Web or Library 2.0 services, the excuses people will use to argue against such things, arguments such as the immaturity of the technology, expense, legal risks and fear. He wanted us to be able to take technologies beyond the so-called chasm on the Gartner Hype Cycle, the gap between the use of a technology by enthusiasts and early adopters and its wider deployment. He gave some alarmingly familiar examples of statements made by librarians about IT departments, for example that they don't understand learning and teaching and think students only use the web for messing around. He compared government attempts at social control (ID cards and greater powers of arrest) with IT departments' instincts to manage users' applications and ban some software; both too, he suggested, may exaggerate threats to win their arguments. But he warned us against IT and librarian fundamentalists; the latter think they know better than the user, think users should be forced to learn Boolean searching, don't want them to do their own searching or classifying. Librarians also still want to catalogue the whole Web and want a service to be perfect before being released to users. The Web 2.0 of perpetual beta is alien to them. In the language of Little Britain (a reference that I fear may have been lost on some of his international audience) he suggested that rather than saying "computer says no", we should adopt the Pollardian ambiguities of "yeah, but, no, but, yeah" or, "Yeah, like Wikis are well cool, but OK so I copied my homework but, like I always copy my homework". He concluded by arguing for a risk management approach and gave some examples of experimental uses of Web 2.0 services.
Technorati Tags: ILI2006, internetlibrarianinternational, library 2.0
