All systems, be they organism or organizations, must adapt to change in order to survive. This applies to libraries and librarians as well. New technology is a fact of life---our children and some of our patrons use a variety of new tech ways to communicate with the world, and if we have no idea what those ways are, we are out of touch and out of date. Reading about innovations is better than nothing, but to truly glimpse the possibilites of those innovations we must become familiar with them in a way only achievable by using them.
Bart Decrem of Flock said that the Web 1.0 was an information source and the Web 2.0 was a participatory web---but haven't people been participating all along, with bulletin boards and putting up web pages and wikis and blogs? All those have been around for quite a while. Isn't it more a change of degree, an increase in participation and participatory tools, rather than a whole new Web? I see libraries the same way---I love them and what they do, but agree we need to keep up with the new ways to communicate information. That doesn't mean we have to chuck all the traditional ways---can't we add to our skill and knowledge base, so that we can help both the patron who wants to use the Reader's Guide to find a magazine article and the patron who only uses digital information?
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