The Web 2.0—Library 2.0 discussion seems to be providing many of the ideas that professional librarians are using to try to understand and plan for the future. For this reason alone, we will all have to try to follow that discussion and try to understand what it may mean for libraries in the long run.
The Library 2.0 discussion is about the way that technology and “Web 2.0” may shape or amplify social and cultural trends to disrupt and remake libraries' relationships with their patrons. It is about the way technology may mesh with administrative and economic imperatives to change the way libraries are supported, administered, and staffed. And finally, it is about how libraries will weather, if they can, the end of the modern world: Do they still have a job worth doing? How will they find their patrons, and the financial support they need to survive, in the storm of disintermediation, delocalization, and dematerialization that is gathering before them?
I surveyed the OCLC Newsletter on libraries and Web 2.0, read Wikipedia articles on Web 2.0 and Library 2.0, and looked here and there at the links and references in them, and tried to understand where the various bits and pieces of this discussion might lead. Here are some random responses:
Mash-ups and flexible, modular APIs allow you to imagine doing wonderful things with the library's online catalog, providing local tagging, patron reviews, and other things. Here are a few suggestions: How about being able to see current prices for the first edition on ABE books or ebay? That first English edition of Machiavelli's Prince is going for 17 or 18 thousand dollars? Maybe it is worth reading all the way through, after all! Or look up Daniel Patrick Moynihan's Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding and see in the margin that it was cited (say) in 200 books and 800 articles in the 1970s, but only in 20 books since 2000. We could provide a “thing” that patrons could put up on their own blogs or web pages that would show “what I am reading now,” a list of what they have currently checked out. Many patrons would love a “my library” page that could access a list of everything they have ever checked out. Many patrons just don't share the professional librarian's concern for privacy that leads us to avoid keeping such records ourselves. Those who prefer publicity over privacy should be able to have what they want, and vice versa.
A lot of these ideas are not that realistic, given current staffing and skills. “Perpetual beta” and quick turn around for projects sounds good, but thats not how it really works in our library, where the good virtual services people struggle to keep what we have up and going. Flexibility of the kind people are dreaming of in Library 2.0 requires quite an investment in skills and in experiments that may not always reap immediate results.
Some of the most realistic articles were about the way technology can promote cooperation and sharing of resources between libraries. This is, unquestionably, a good thing, opening the way to better and more cost-effective service. On the other hand? Its quite possible to imagine, further along this road, that something like the state library commission would run the ILS for all local libraries in the state, off of a single server farm, and that even the larger local library systems would need fewer technical staff. Perhaps cataloging and, for smaller libraries, even collection management would migrate in the same direction. “Local identity” for libraries would perhaps become more and more of a false front end. Such a monolithic service provider would capture its clientèle, and might in time become a profitable political target for privatization. Eventually, and this would become even easier as people demand everything on the Web, the whole thing could, even more profitably, be phoned in from a foreign country, where people are still paid a lot less.
Surely that is an extreme scenario, you say? Well, surely it is. But it does capture something indefinable about Web 2.0. For all the celebration of its social side, on-line communities and the like, Web 2.0 now plays a role similar to that played by advertising in supporting corporate capitalism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It offers a pleasant and superficial patina for deeper, and potentially more disturbing, developments. Behind every Web 2.0 application, without exception, as far as I can see, there is a huge database. Your data in that database does not belong to you.
I seem to notice that the people who write the more “cheerleading” kinds of essays about Library 2.0 are not very interested in books. For various reasons, I am personally pretty optimistic about the survival of book culture and about the way way libraries and book culture can sustain each other. Those Library 2.0 cheerleaders are also culturally passive; strikingly so, in having so much to say about how libraries should change to adapt to the “new” culture and absolutely nothing to say about any role libraries might play in shaping that culture.
Nobody has fully understood the impact of disintermediation on libraries. One of aspect of disintermediation is that libraries become publishers. Libraries become publishers when they allow their patrons to tag and review their books. How do they then deal, one article asks, with insulting ethnic tags? Or a problem review? Do they let these things stand as expressions of the real world we live in? They are more likely to need to edit them out according to some standard of what is and is not appropriate for a public institution to offer. Libraries become publishers when they digitize pictures or texts and put them on-line, when they put up podcasts of book talks or story times. Libraries become publishers when they begin to offer more “portal-like” pages to introduce their books and on-line databases to patrons in a more interesting and integrated way. They face the same design and presentation issues that say, an on-line magazine publisher might face. And they are likely to need to meet the same standards for design, reliability, and quality of content. Otherwise, in time, other kinds of providers will win their on-line audience away.
Who should know, better than librarians, that information has its own ecology. Its availability and quality reflects the economic, social, political, and scientific environment of some particular place and time. Some is copyrighted and some is not, some can be freely accessed, some cannot. Some communities can afford to buy licenses to access certain kinds of information and some cannot. Some information that is available on the web is here today, but will be gone tomorrow, as governments or businesses remove it from circulation, or begin to charge for it. Librarians do their jobs well when they help their patrons understand that ecology.
The two cheerleading articles that open the OCLC Next Space Newsletter on Web 2.0 appeared to me to promote an emerging “Web 2.0 reality” as a kind of self-sustaining narcissistic illusion that ignores that ecology of information. Because information has contexts, it will never be pushbutton simple. Libraries will always be about educating their users. As I read the essays (and it is possible to get a much larger dose of Michael Stephens with a Google search), I had the feeling that they were trying to promote a kind of “technological correctness” for librarians, quite unconnected with the values and community service libraries and librarians have stood for in the past.
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