In Away from the “Icebergs” by Rick Anderson, he states “During the print era, if you wanted access to pricey indexes or a collection of scholarly journals, you had no choice but to make a trip to the library. It wasn’t a good system, but it worked.”
I flashed to a public library in a mid-size town I was recently visiting. I needed to use the internet, so off I trotted to the library with my tween daughter in tow. Nobody smiled or noticed either of us, the sterile computer area was a bit hard to find, and the woman in charge looked bored to death. Oh, and the printer didn’t work that day. And the computers were really close together and kind of dirty. Off to the side of the roped off computer area were shelves old indexes. Who uses those, I thought. They look stuffy and intimidating – and I was one of the few people there who actually knew what they were. I remembered thinking that next year when I visit again; I’ll have my laptop and won’t have to go to this horrible place. Instead I’ll go a nice coffee shop with tables & chairs, funky artwork, smiles and of course, coffee. And I felt awful for considering the library to be an awful place, but if I’m thinking it so are other potential patrons. My daughter hated it. I wonder if their circulation numbers are going down.
To More Powerful Ways To Cooperate by Chip Nilges made me think about OCLU, which I haven’t done in many years. Of course I took cataloging one & two during my MLS, but at my district other people do the cataloging J and that is just fine with me. I hadn’t realized that I could use Worldcat to search for books in neighboring libraries – that is way fun.
The thought that really stood out to me in this article is that “Perhaps the most important principal of Web 2.0 at OCLC is that “data is the next Intel inside.” O’Reilly argues that “every significant internet application to date has been backed by a specialized database.”” This reaffirms what we have been studying in this Library2.0 class about the power of the social network and how tagging provides the cohesiveness required for the whole thing to work.
I made a point to read A Ripple Effect by George Bishop, because I am in a school district, although mine is an urban district. I thought one of the most important points of the article was “Satisfying these needs quickly built a teacher and student support base.” This isn’t a library2.0 lesson, it is a good management lesson. All of the tools we have at our disposal won’t matter if we don’t build relationships and trust with our patrons. “Every time a new service or database was added, there was curriculum integration.” Perfect, give the classroom teachers a reason to use the tool; show them how it will enhance their teaching.
The suggestion for small libraries to succeed where also well thought out. Things like networking with other, perhaps different, libraries, be service oriented, be visible and promoting. All in all, I found this to be an encouraging and empowering article and was glad to have read it.
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