john-23things

To begin at the end, Wendy Schultz proposes a value chain from commodity to product to service to experience, with experience proposed as a far-future version of the Library.

Library 4.0 revives the old image of a country house library, and renovates it: from a retreat, a sanctuary, a pampered experience with information—subtle thoughts, fine words, exquisite brandy, smooth coffee, aromatic cigar, smell of leather, rustle of pages—to the dream economy’s library, the LIBRARY: a WiFREE space, a retreat from technohustle, with comfortable chairs, quiet, good light, coffee and single malt. You know, the library.

I'm stickin' around if there's single malt coming....

There's more to this, though, than leather armchairs and good sippin' whisky, and the balancing act is going to be a delicate one. Rohit Bhargava suggests that this is all about putting the people back into the search. Rick Anderson notes that we don't often have the time or the staff to teach comprehensive courses in the use of library resources, & so we need to design and use interfaces that don't need to be taught. He also suggests that we need to deliver information to patrons where they are, to make ourselves relevant and accessible in their busy schedules so that they'll use the library even if they don't visit the library. This last point is echoed by Michael Stephens, who suggests that we meet users where they are, and that we're as transparent about it as possible. He also foresees a future where Librarians and customers are masters of the mashup. This is a broader trend in technology. I don't want to read the whole newspaper. Just deliver the sports pages to my RSS reader. I don't want to pay $25 for the whole CD. Just let me download the two tracks that I like on I-Tunes. Let me take it and make it mine!

Laura Cohen, author of the Library 2.0 manifesto, responds to discussion of her document by noting three key obstacles to the universal embracing of 2.0 philosophies. Her second point hits home with me most strongly:

I'm of the opinion that the leap from 0.0 to 1.0 was a less significant one than the leap from 1.0 to 2.0. Why? When we first moved from card catalogs to OPACs, and from paper handouts to Gopher and then Web sites, we were changing media but not our relationship with users. We were (and pretty much still are) doing it "my way." We had total control. It was our material, our input, our world. I've come to the conclusion that this is a very comfortable place for most librarians to be. (I don't mean to imply that only librarians are comfortable here, but hey, this is a librarian's blog.) I think it's much more difficult to let users into our spaces as active participants. Let them modify our Web pages? tag our catalog records? blog their opinions about us? mash up our content on other sites? This is a far more radical proposition than putting our content online and under our control.

So we need content unbound. Content that can be sorted and searched and combined and digested in any way that can be thought of, & in some that haven't been thought of yet. To blend the "country house library" with the technology of 2.0, though, we're going to need to be master architects. To produce a 2.0 library that can simultaneously deliver content to users in their preferred format (a very tech-centric endeavor) and appear to be a "retreat from the technohustle" as proposed by Wendy Schultz will be a difficult and expensive proposition.

Here's what I'm really curious about..... The accelerated pace of change. I don't think it will be long before the most affluent or most visionary libraries are looking at Library 2.5 or 3.0, while others are still struggling to provide enough PACs... Is anything 2.0 a luxury commodity? How does Library 2.0 service become not only a system's commitment but a global standard?