LIS 9763

    The material this week has gotten me thinking about web 2.0 technologies more than any week so far. What really stood out to me was how explicitly the materials stated what we have been saying all along in this course. There is a strong element of communication, be it from companies, libraries, employees, or the general masses. We have spoken at length about how social media can be used to promote the library week after week, but in general we have neglected the fundamental aspect of communication and creating a dialogue to promote advancement.
    We began the course talking about blogging, and one thing that came up over and over was how important it is for bloggers to monitor and respond to comments. This is how the dialogue is maintained and communication actually happens. Likewise, libraries can post pictures of videos on a variety of media sharing sites, but if they post them and forget about them, they are not doing anything to promote the library as a place for dialogue. I think Clay Shirky really summed this point up well when he made the point that people do not want to just consume, they want to consume, create and share. If librarians post and leave their content stagnant, they are being no better than the tv producer mentioned in Clay Shirky’s talk.
    For libraries to be successful at web 2.0, they need to adopt that mentality of opening up the dialogue and be prepared to participate in it openly. This goes for their outward web 2.0 projects for the wider community, but also for their internal workings. For libraries to maintain passionate employees, they need to adopt the attitude that their employees can experience every night when they go home from work – that they can share an idea, and it will be received and reflected upon. It is easy to get caught up in the idea that if you put something on the internet, there will be someone somewhere who likes it. The important message is not that every idea will be taken up and accepted, but that every idea can be considered.
    The article about the transparent library is a good one for illustrating the above point. Even if not all staff members have an overt say in the strategies or policies of the library, they should be able to consume and content on it. If there is one thing that social software has taught us, it’s that there are so many people at our disposal now that we never would have had the chance to interact with before this time. We must also be aware that there is now an outlet for ideas now that was not present before. We can see in countless web 2.0 examples, the power of people getting together to discuss a topic. These cases should be taken up in our daily work as well. We will most likely not have a worldwide network available to work through policy ideas, but we do have a staff that probably wouldn’t have been considered for input in the past. Being open to the opinions of all members of staff contributing their ideas will, if nothing else, offer consideration to facets of an issue that may not have been considered before. As Clay Shiirky said, “doing something is better than doing nothing”. Libraries have been guilty of adhering to the status quo for a long time. This is beginning to change, but the library needs management who is willing to take risks to do so. A very safe way to do this is to just consider the opinions of the resources they interact with every day. It is also important to note that many of these projects have a high risk of failure, but I think it’s still worth attempting more risky implementations to keep the experimental dialogue open.