Learning new things is good. Learning things you thought you knew is even better.
I’ll admit to being a little blind in the past, excited with ideas that grow more from techonolust than a direct service to a user. Not that these were necessarily bad ideas, starting a blog for the collection, a wiki for sharing departmental information and knowledge. I think they’re good ideas, but I feel like they started from the question “why aren’t we using these tools?” instead of “how would these tools serve our users?” Thankfully we got to the second question, but we got there backwards…
Library 2.0 isn’t about technology. Library 2.0 is about the user. Of course technology is going to be a major tool in that interaction, it has to. It’s the forum in which more and more of our users grow and live. That’s where we’re going to have to be prepared to meet them. And while we’re going there, what about creating more opportunities for them to meet each other?
Users and patrons. I think that’s an exciting prospect. All too often it seems that libraries and librarians are too concerned with libraries and librarians. Don’t we want to make people passionate about what we’re passionate about? I think that’s part of human nature. We want to connect with people who like what we like, and beyond that we want people to teach people about things we’re excited about. As a librarian, I want the users to be excited about my library, my collection, my interests. Who wouldn’t? It seems a no-brainer to me. Why isn’t it?
With that in mind and reading through Casy and Savastinuk one thing really stands out to me. The other major part of the participatory library experience is the one that governs everything we do: management. Sure time management, but I’m talking about people management. We can’t make these things happen without the buy-in from those above us. We can’t keep these things active without support from the people that are directly involved and effected. That can take as much work as learning to use these tools. Actually, it could take more in many cases.
It bums me out when decisions need to fall down to ’survival’. I’d love it if we could all have wide open eyes of excitement. We need to be open to growth. We need to be open to change. Constant change and growth that brings us and our users together. If we don’t we’ll lose them. We’ll just be an empty, rusting husk.
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