Michael Stephens and Michael Casey publicly hash-out some Library 2.0 thoughts over at ALA Techsource.

A good part of their talk was about how libraries, in many cases, are shooting themselves in the foot. I’d speculate that they’re probably correct in their assessments. We’re lucky at AADL to have forward-thinking people in our administration, but often times, it’s department heads that push the agenda. Talk to them, make them see the light too.

Some highlights:

Casey:
…If you can’t send people to the conference, then at least assign some members of your Emerging Technology Committee to review the info that comes out of that conference and find ways to implement some of the more attractive ideas…

…We get stuck in ruts, providing the same services to the same groups of people, without looking beyond our world to the masses that do yet not use our services. I often speak of reaching for that “Long Tail,” the concept of trying to drive toward the large numbers that don’t even think of the library as a resource to be used. If we cannot break out of that mold, that way of thinking, then we will never progress…

(I’d hate to be this library right now.)

Stephens:
So much is coming together in my mind right now: OCLC’s Perceptions, the Gaming Symposium, working with CPL, and following the discourse here. They all feed into the idea of L2. The idea of the library as a spot for kids to race and dance and for young people to record podcasts and develop digital videos just like the great directors and seek their own forms of entertainment to their hearts’ content…it makes me very happy …

Great post, guys.. and what a good format for this discussion.

DaveP announced on his blog yesterday that he had created a tag cloud of subject keywords from his Horizon database. It’s really sweet.. check it out.

Kudos Dave!

Then he went one step further and released some generic code to allow others to do the same.

I’m anxious to port his work to a PHP class. I’d also like to use some kind of sliding scale to generate proportional tags for different orders of magnitude. There is a drupal module called Tagadelic that sort of does this, but the author is still searching for a more meaningful algorythim.

Anyone seen some math for long-tail?

Dion Hinchcliffe made some good points in his blog about some very real issues facing web 2.0, and with the flurry of Library 2.0 activity, I can’t help but see some of the same issues translate over. I had several thoughts that articulated themselves after reading his post.

Let me preface all this by saying that we’re working very hard at AADL to bring a number of major Web 2.0 features online, and you’ll see them in our forthcoming feature releases. We’re excited about it and I believe that the viability of the information access we provide depends on the social connections we allow to happen with the data we have to provide.

1) Hinchcliffe begins his list of “10 issues Facing Web 2.0 Today” with excessive hype. He writes, “Nothing will hurt Web 2.0 more than people loudly proclaiming Web 2.0 is the solution to every problem in software.” I’m not quite sure what he means by “in software”, but I assume he’s talking about interface since he goes on, “Web 2.0 is merely a powerful way of thinking about the design and construction of effective Web experiences.” Before we hype features that the technology elite embrace, ask, “will our patrons feel the same way?” The other consideration you may want to make is, “is it technically feasible to offer these features?” In some libraries, the answer to both these questions might be ‘no’.

2) He makes another good point that much of the social-oriented software requires a permaconnection. I’m used to being online all the time and when I go to my full-blown-geek conferences, I’d say that about 80-90% of the attendees have laptops. When I went to IL05, I’d reckon that percentage was around 35-30%. Apparently, that was the highest ever at an IL, and IL attracts the ‘techie’ library people. When I look at MRTG graphs of AP associations for all four branches in Ann Arbor, I see peaks of 10-15 simultaneous wifi users. While 2.0-type functionality doesn’t necessarily require a permaconnection, I’d venture to guess that these permaconnectees are the minority who will appreciate and use those features.

3) It’s one thing to talk about Web 2.0 or Library 2.0, but if you’re only talking about it, that’s not implementing it in any meaningful way. To implement it, you need to fully understand the technologies behind it. Ajax is a great example, and I pull it from Hinchcliffe’s list at #5. I see “Ajax” bandied about like a tambourine at a Phish show, but if you’ve used it, you’ll agree with me that it’s a tricky beast to get working properly. Does anyone actually USE google reader? I’m not that patient! In fact, Gmail is the only semi-widescale use of Ajax that I know of, and tightened-down Windows 2003 policies break it. Like a lot of things, it’s best in tasteful sprinklings.

4) Face it, our ILS’s are dinosaurs. They are huge masses of bloat and excess. They pervert standards and gobble up money with their cavernous, proprietary maws. They need to be, and I’m serious here, rewritten from the ground up. I almost jumped out of my skin when I saw Jenny Levine’s mockup of a tag cloud in III’s OPAC. If that were my tag data, the last place I’d trust it would be inside III’s belly! Why? I can’t even do a simple item#-to-bib# conversion without running a full blown report, parsing the data, importing it into a real database and THEN running a query. We need openness and transparency so we don’t have to wait for vendors to grace us with hot new features, several years too late, (and several hundred grand lighter in our pocket). It’s complacency with this type of service that will kill 2.0 from the inside out before it even starts. The current model needs to end, or we’re screwed.

Being a hands-on guy, I sometimes ask the dreaded question, “But how?”, or make the statement, “That’s all very good in theory, but…” That can seem negative, but it’s necessary because when you ask those questions for real, you come back the next day with real answers and you say, “Yah, we can do it and it’s gonna be friggin’ sweet!”