Exploration 9 - What's Next and Looking Back

"Remember how encouraging it was to see that first comment posted on your blog post?"

Sniff...I'm still waiting for mine!

Aside from the loneliness, it's been rather fun learning about the many possibilties that exist with web 2.0. Before the project, I usually just thought of web 2.0 in terms of what I was already familiar with: YouTube, MySpace/Facebook, blogs, tagging and folksonomies. Granted, all of those things were wonderful but at this point, they are old hat to me. I'm experienced with them and I've gotten to the point where I see the value, but believe that our technological limitations here in the library prevent us from using them to our full advantage.

While this project gave you the opportunity to explore those sites if you had not already, I enjoyed how the focus was on other less talked about tools of this revolution: online desktop publishing software, web-based "libraries", and social bookmarking were all things that I had heard of in passing, but never really explored in terms of thier usefulness here in the libraries. After exploring them in the name of on-the-job research, I see their value as more than just a time-waster and am seriously considering how I could use them in my day-to-day duties.

In addition, I came to appreciate other sites in a different way. Before the project, Flickr was the place (along with Picasa and Photobucket) was a site I went to to to view pictures from a friend's trip or night out. Now I see that fellow librarians and major institutions (such as the Library of Congress) are taking advantage of it as a way to reach out to others in their field, or simply use participatory culture to both aid their research as well as open up their collections to a whole new audience.

Though I haven't decided yet if I'll keep updating my blog, I do plan to continue utilizing and looking into the possibilties of web 2.0 in our library. I still believe that we need to do more to improve the technological capabilities and capacities of our system in order to support new technologies. At the same time, I now realize that there is plenty out there that we can handle with our current setup and use to the benefit of our patrons as well as each other.

Exploration 3 - Flickr

I've always felt that one of Flickr's best qualities was the ability for people to add tags to describe their photos in natural language. It is a feature that is starting to be included in some databases and library catalogs. After all, the way LC or Dewey describes a particular material is not necessarily how a regular person would. Additionally, why should an item necessarily be limited to three descriptors? Though bibliographic control certainly has its place in libraries, the advent of tagging is a welcome addition to make searching easier and more accessible to the everyday user--and possibly more interactive (or "2.0") by allowing them to add their own tags to a libray catalog.

But back to Flickr itself. Doing a search for "librarian", I came across a group called "I am a librarian", which encouraged its members and viewers to consider the following:

"Since we don't look like librarians, what does a librarian look like?"

By posting photos of librarians both inside and outside their "natural habitat", the group seeks to break the outdated stereotypes of who we are in our profession. We are not the stuffy, reserved "shusshers" of yesteryear, but a more proactive (and increasingly younger) group of individuals looking to serve our community while providing traditional as well as innovative informational services. I really like how this group is using a 2.0 initiative like Flickr to allow people to question their traditional views of our profession.

I think Flickr could have some useful purposes in the library. For staff, it would be a great way to document and easily catagorize and maintain photos from library programs. This would be an easy way for people throughout the system to take a look at what's going on at each branch, add comments, and link pictures through common tags (such as "Summer Reading Club" or "holiday").

The Library of Congress' Flickr project fascinates me in that they are encouraging the public to contribute to the pursuit of better understanding and identifying the people and circumstances in some of the photos they have collected. I think a public library could take a similar initiative by teaming up with a local archive and encouraging its patrons to help identify people and places in old photos that have been donated over the years. Another possibility is starting a community album of patron submissions that would help document the past and present through family photographs and commentary. Other community users could contribute their own comments and notes to photos, adding to the collective memory in an organized, interactive way.