In my transition from one side of the country to the middle, I fell woefully behind on reading library blogs. Most of them (sorry to say) I find to be boring, all about technology and totally lacking in conversation about actually working the reference desk. One of my favorites, though, is Information Wants to Be Free. Meredith Farkas is insightful and articulate and I love her entry about Library 2.0. I've always found Library 2.0 not grounded fully in reality, or at least not taking our patron's desires into account. See my entry about MyLibraryDV from last year.
It's all fine and good to be excited about new technology and even to try it out for yourself, but we have to think very carefully about how we choose to spend our time and money. A library MySpace page may be free but if it's not being updated how does that look? And who cares if no one is looking at it anyway? As I've said for years, I would love to see libraries spend more money marketing our basic services. Our professionals behind the desk, our very expensive databases, etc.
I've never had a patron ask me a question about flicker or MySpace or del.icio.us. And as I sit here looking at all the tough, emotionally challenged patrons sitting in front of me, I'd love some social worker training.
4 comments:
right, but you HAVE been asked about setting up an email account, bidding on ebay, applying for a job online, buying on craigslist... some of this other stuff just hasn't trickled down to the masses, but i'm sure it will. i can see a grandparent coming in to get assistance viewing photos of their grandchildren on flickr, etc.
sn
Oh I totally agree. I can see that happening. My point, though, is that I'm not sure the library needs to have a flicker account, or a myspace account, etc. I wonder if staff should know how to manage these sites but not necessarily have our own.
That would be an interesting post. Librarians, should we go into social networking or social service agency OR are we already there.
Interesting, Jeff. it certainly feels to me that we are already both a social service agency and a social networking center. I think libraries, while it's great to focus on our virtual presence, remember that our physical presence is still important to a lot of people.
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