#15 Blog on Library 2.0 & Web 2.0

The visions in the five articles on Web 2.0 are so mind blowing that I needed some time to formulate any thoughts at all. Especially ‘To a temporary space in time’ showing Library 2.0 is still only product based, at an early stage on the way to a heavenly state in which each person can have the individual & unique experience their heart’s desire, via the intervening stage of virtual reality.
In one way the world has exploded into exponentially increasing power to achieve.
In another way nothing has changed - libraries have always aspired to, but never achieved, relevance to every single community member, whose needs & preferences vary infinitely, i.e. a goal of all things to all people.
And whilst playing on Learning 2.0 is exciting & enlightening, there’s no change either in the need for confronting & challenging work by human beings (the library’s staff especially) to make the hard decisions in allocating finite resources of all sorts. (Current degree of difficulty: highest ever). The potential of technology, though enormous, is less than the increasing complexity & challenge in harnessing it to exactly match & anticipate each & every customer’s needs, whilst resources by contrast, are not infinite. Medical services face the same challenges.
Whereas in the past progress meant discarding an older way in a linear progress, everything ever done or held now needs to be available somehow, because some customers will still want vastly different parts of how it used to be. Sometimes too, customers (as well as staff), may not want to be interactive, wired or wireless, or find endless possibility motivating, for every minute of 24/7.
Libraries still need to do it all – & it’s still a tall order.
To end on a positive note, as sometime library worker Mao Tse-tung (along with Chinese philosophers) noted, the journey of 1000 miles begins with a single step.