CiL: The Web 2.0 Challenge to Libraries
Paul Miller, Talis
Paul is a great speaker — funny, engaging & passionate. He began his presentation with an outline of the four topics he was going to cover:
- libraries and trust
- reaching out from the library
- library 2.0 platform
- shared innovation
Minor aside: the session overview is so crucial. It has the potential to hook your audience or lose them from the get-go. I’m often amazed at the lack of attention paid to the overview. But anyway. Paul’s overview was great — succinct, interesting, and had me looking forward to the rest of the session.
He began with a few high-impact slides, to the effect of: “how do people find stuff?” audience: Google. “How else do people find stuff?” You guessed it: Google – just different iterations of the same tool (google searchbar, google desktop, etc.). He then contrasted this with some findings from a couple of recent studies (OCLC’s Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources and a MORI study that I didn’t get the title of) that prove a few things:
- the number of active borrowers in our libraries has plummeted and continues to fall
- the number of people visiting libraries is on the rise
- 89% of people in the UK trust libraries (the #1 institution when it comes to public trust – more than the BBC!)
So, people are coming into our libraries, and they trust us, but they continue to use Google and other web 2.0 utilities to find things. Begs the question: where did we go wrong? A couple of places:
- we design user interfaces that suck
- we continue to alienate with our jargon
Paul’s response to this disconnect is Library 2.0. Here are the attibutes and goals of library 2.0:
- open the library
- push the library everywhere
- engage with actual and potential user communities
- disaggregate library systems – unpack the big ILS box, take what you need, leave what you don’t, build what you want, and…
- …put it all back together again – library system as lego: build what you want to build, not the picture on the box
- shared innovation – we need to work together, share experiences and innovations, learn from each other.
Paul went on to highlight some of the ways in which libraries and librarians are doing these things already (Casey Bisson’s WPopac, greasemonkey scripts, etc.), making their data work harder, not necessarily for a worthy cause, but often because it simply engages users. His point though was that we should all be doing this together — building a “Library 2.0 platform”, a platform that makes efficient use of our collective development efforts (i.e.: in aggregate, we have more data and more borrowers than amazon has buyers).
I really, really liked Paul’s vision for the Library 2.0 platform especially the bits about the platform needing to cross the vendor divide, because if this has any hope of succeeding, we need to be able to share our data and our ILSs need to be able to “talk” to one another without too much bludgeoning on either end. As Paul noted, we shouldn’t need to change our library systems just to take advantage of the networks that we’re building.
His call to action and conclusions:
- we need to do this together
- this will only work if we all collaborate and participate (that includes vendors)
- we need to share ideas, experiences, code, innovation
- get the discussion rolling at Talis’ Shared Innovation blog
- the library deserves to reach out beyond our walls
- vendor and library initiated silos just don’t make sense
- challenge current business models and assumptions (ditch the “that’s the way we’ve always done it” attitude; everything is fair game and up for grabs)
- share innovation
Paul has posted his presentation slides over at panlibus, definitely give them a read when you have a chance.
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