Confessions of a technophile

I'm at the Bridging Worlds 2008 conference this week in Singapore - it's the first one I know of with library 2.0 as the main theme here in Asia. Although most librarians would have heard about library 2.0, I'm not sure if everyone knows what it really means for librarians.

Jenny Levine started the ball rolling by citing Dave Lankes' work on participatory librarianship - way to go Syracuse! Though participatory librarianship provides a good theoretical foundation for libraries to find their role in the sea of user-generated content, no one is entirely sure how libraries can help to make those objects of creation easier to find and preserve. There's also the critical issue of sustainability - what is the scope of the librarian's role in this information environment? Are we going to scrape the existing universe of user generated content for quality stuff? Or do we try to get users to gravitate toward the "knowledge communities" that some libraries are trying to seed?

Many libraries have started cultural heritage projects as a way to facilitate conversations within communities. This is one of our strengths and the easiest way to begin, since libraries already have rich collections of cultural heritage material. And through user conversations, this content can be enriched in unexpected ways, as Sydney's Powerhouse Museum has found.

I'm not sure, however, if we should go out to the wild wide web and try to get users to create content on "knowledge communities" sanctioned by the library. Why should one start a social network of writers with the library vs. doing the same thing on Goodreads? There are many other Web 2.0 sites with good VC backing that can do these better than libraries. Stop chasing things you can't catch.

A more sustainable strategy would be to start conversations with what we have. Begin with collections that libraries have worked hard to put together. These are our strengths. Revamp the catalog from one that is essentially an inventory system to one that's centered on user conversations and the contexts in which the content was used. That's more useful to people than just bibliographic records and lists of things in this example.