Library 2.0 with Librarian 1.0?

Rochelle reflects a lot of my feelings about the Library 2.0 Future-is-Now vibe. I get it, I grok it, I want more of it. However, it’s a slow sell some places and a tough slow sell in other places. I spend a lot of time just trying to drop 2.0 words into conversations I have with the librarians on my route just so they’ll have some familiarity with them when they make their technology plans, or when the local wireless salesman knocks on their door. Even thinking about some of Michael’s great suggestions for an “easy” 2.0 upgrade requires paradigm shifts in the way many of the librarians I work with were trained to think. Does this mean it’s impossible? Surely not. Does it mean that baby steps may be in order, or more groundwork needs to be laid? Absolutely.

Folks who know me know I’m not a naysayer, but talking about sending a librarian to a Gaming Symposium when staff do not get time off, funding, or even dues reimbursement for ALA or even VLA is somewhat more optimistic and futuristic than it may seem from an urban or suburban library system perspective. When change happens, it will happen fast, no doubt about it, and it will be useful to have people alread “on the ground” to greet it when it arrives, but let’s work on the all boats part of the “rising tide lifts all boats” aphorism and make sure we’re not all heading to 2.0 when some of us are still in 0.98 beta.

ask the librarian column by Alice Maggio

Ask the Librarian is a well-written question-answering column written by Alice Maggio in the web publication Gaper’s Block. Can you say “reading list sidebar“? We should all have this sort of presence.

“Excuse me, can you help me?”

I heard this question as I sat, hunched over a book, on an overcast afternoon at a Brown Line platform on the Northwest Side. But a single woman, alone on an El platform, enjoys few things less than solicitations or unwanted advances from strangers. I steeled myself for a confrontation as I lifted my eyes from my book, the automatic “sorry” already halfway to my lips. But the word died on my tongue when I saw the young man standing in front of me.

1,082 books, the Penguin Classics Library, replaces personal library lost in a forest fire

I always wondered what sorts of people bought the entire Penguin Classics Library Complete Collection [$8K at Amazon, with free shipping]. Well one sort is the librarian who has lost her entire personal library in a forest fire. She has no TV, no children, four cats and one very generous and thoughful husband.

Thousands of scorched tree trunks still range up the hillside across the street from Ms. Gursky’s new home here, but inside the house, her library is well on the way to recovery. In September, Ms. Gursky received a birthday gift from her husband that earned her the envy of her book-loving friends: the complete collection of the Penguin Classics Library, 1,082 books sold only by Amazon.com for nearly $8,000.

[thanks kathleen]