This is maybe my last post to this blog. My intention was to kill it after ELAG, because it has served it’s original purpose, and because there are a number of blogs on this topic that are much more comprehensive. I have however decided to let it live on, at least for some time. Perhaps until ELAG 2008? You are all free to utilize whatever content here you find useful, including the pictures at the Flickr site. The blog will remain open for commenting! Note that this particular blog is not indexed by Google, Technorati and other agents.
About Facebook
Facebook is currently the “social Internet arena” receiving the most attention from Norwegian mass media, with a strong focus on the astonishing amount of time young people are spending in this virtual space, and the darker sides of it.
An example of the not so dark aspects, probably relevant to our 2.0 focus, may be this message, quoted from some email list: “Digital Reference in Facebook is an umbrella group devoted to digital reference services that offer a companion Facebook site and is available at http://iastate.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2406828163“
About SlideShare
It just occured to me that the Powerpoint “Unfinished notes” from our workshop perhaps should be posted to some space like SlideShare, instead of being uploaded to this blog space as I did to start with. Not so much because these slides are particularly valuable, but more to illustrate yet another way to mashup:
The manifesto above (by Ere Maijala) is the short version of our report.
Additionally, we agreed on the following
List of priorities
1. Encourage interaction with our services from “other environments”
2. Be present in these environments
2. Supply such environments
(”Other environments” = other than traditional library user interfaces such as opacs, portals etc. Typical examples are learning environments, and social / virtual spaces like MySpace, Facebook, Second Life)
There are obviously different stakeholders with potential interests in the 2.0 concepts. We identified a numer of roles, not necessarily being mutually exclusive. In fact, one typical 2.0 aspect might in fact be the blurring of the distinctions of these roles, e.g. between content producer and content consumer:
Actual users
Potential users
Consumers
Librarians
Developers (including hackers)
Service suppliers
Creators
Publishers
Right holders
Funding agencies
Government
Big brother
We believe all the underlined stakeholder categories were present in our workshop …
Technologies
It turned out that we were not primarily interested in discussing technical issues, but at least used one workshop session to list some important technical mechanisms:
Mashups / remix
Architectures
Service oriented architectures
Machine accessible components
Small,well defined pieces
Content separated from presentation
Interfaces
Open standards
Web services (WSDL)
Tools & techniques
OAI-ORE
Ajax, RSS, Widgets, applets, etc
Watch your appetite
Services
Metadata: aim for comprehensiveness
Following the users wherever they go?
We returned to yesterdays question whether we like that the users are moving from the library (web) spaces to other arenas, and agreed on
If nothing else, we accept it
In any case, the important thing is keeping them using our services, not primarily our spaces (user environments, interfaces)
We also discussed
a number of other Library 2.0 issues, some of these are treated in our Unfinished notes (ppt)
The room and technical facilities were perfect. We spent most of the day playing with some of the 2.0 tools/toys, and watching videos from YouTube and Second Life. Thom showed us FictionFinder and other “beta” services from OCLC,
and Ere how to utilize the browser search bars to access the Finnish Nelli portal. Ole probably (by accident) messed up Nick Caves works in LibraryThing.
What is Library 2.0?
In between we discussed this big question. We (probably) agreed that Library 2.0 is more about attitude than about technology, and offer this list of characteristics:
Better 10 screws loose than one too tight
We are the web
Openness
Trust
Knowledge sharing
Collective intelligence / hive mind
Participation / social network
Web 2.0 technologies adapted to the library environment
The emperor’s new clothes 2.0
Blogging
Ole complained that his blog did not really attract much participation, and everybody told that they had been too busy to involve themselves. A hands-up survey showed that appr 5 of us have any personal blogging experience.
Following the users how far?
We noted the quite sensational fact that the time spent on TV for the first time in history is going down, and that “many” users spend their time in other “spaces”.
The users are not coming to the Library Portal or to the e-Learning environments. Instead they are on other virtual spaces such as
FaceBook
MySpace
Second Life
World of Warcraft
We asked the questions, without trying to answer:
Do we think this is OK?
If YES, what should we do about it?
If NO, what should we do about it?
We will return to these questions.
What is Library 1.0 then?
This question was asked but not answered. Maja suggested this video as an example of Library 0.0, but also commented that perhaps it even demonstrates that nothing much is new under the sun: The Librarian
I am blogging from Aula Magna. Work will start in 1 hour. The response to this blog has been minimal. So we will have to start from the beginning. Wherever that is.
There are surely quite different opinions about which aspects of the “2.0 paradigm” are the most interesting. Many presentations focus on technical issues such as blogs, wikis, RSS, Ajax etc. But equally relevant may be the attitudes of the librarians towards the “new media” and the new user behaviours. Please have a look at this YouTube video:
Some sort of answer to this question is probably expected from us. There are lots of attempts to define this concept, but I do not have any favorite (yet). We may decide to discuss definitions later on. At this moment (2 weeks before our first workshop session) I suggest we start by collecting some examples. Please have a look at the “Library 2.0 examples” page. And please post in a comment your own suggestions for sites to include in this list! My opinion is that we should have quite liberal criteria for qualifying, at least to start with.
Btw, I hope this blog can be used for reporting from workshop 5 on the last day of the conference. That is, if we succeed in documenting our results here. Ambitions should not be too high, there are already a large number of “2.0 blogs” which we should not even try to match!
and there are still 3 weeks until the registration deadline! All of you should have received (or will receive shortly) an email from me inviting to participate by commenting in this blog. And please do that - any comments are welcome! We should be able to get to know each other a bit before meeting face to face. And the more we discuss on beforehand, the easier the workshop sessions in Barcelona should be!
Posted by Ole Husby
