Week 10 Thing 15 (Library 2.0 and the Future of Libraries)

I read several of the suggested selections because I badly need an overview to make sense of what I've learned so far. Wikiopedia, Library 2.0 offered me the definition of terms I've been wanting as well as an explanation of trends and concepts that I've noticed in Commerce and the library for some time and wondered, 'Where are we going?' A Temporary Place in Time offers a peek into a future of library possibilities that seem to offer all the best of 'place' and 'virtual.' The place we wish we'd had and never could have afforded and the sensory enhanced world of knowledge and knowledge of the world by 'virtual' experience.

The discussion of long tails as a business model I found inspirational in counteracting the alarm I feel in Blockbusters when I see the number of video choices shrinking and the number of copies of current movies blooming like flowers in "Little Shop of Horrors" (an interesting movie no longer available there, by the way), usually in horrible fangy, blood dripping, psycho-sexual crazed glory. And I'm sad and frustrated because, where oh where are there good movies to choose from? I've seen all the ones in the library. Answer, I'm looking at short tail marketing. But I am cheered because marketing experiments have discovered a way to meet the less popular demands of the many.

I understand I'm looking at a warehousing and transportation high overhead marketing choice when I stand in Blockbusters and that Netflix, with their all-in-one-place storage offers me an online option for ordering almost any movie from the past I'd want to see. For a monthly fee. Netflix finds patrons galore for their 'deeper' collection. Long Tail.

It is clear that libraries have the same space vrs interest problems and that Library 2.o offers and that even for just this one problem, OPAC systems, especially visual OPAC, offers the solution. The recent move to a 'shared collection' was just a drop in the bucket. Information sharing, resource sharing, is the only way libraries could possibly keep up with the explosion of information dawning in our time. I get it.

As we struggle to provide ways to channel the exponentially exploding amount of information to patrons, it is apparently just as important to get information about patron use and preferences and ideas back into the hands of system makers who are ever-revising vehicles to meet needs.
More than ever we need to know, to be able to determine how data relates, how it was gathered and what impact that has on what we are being presented. I guess there are vehicles for this discrimination process as well. The librarian of the future will have to be very knowledgeable in these areas if she/he is to do a credible job. And that begs the question, "how will librarians of the future be trained? How can public funds possibly pay them what they're worth? Are we to judge the excellence of the help provided us by the happy many or will we use the long tail model for those many but diverse calls for truly accurate, verifiable data? What about first sources? Who will warehouse all the copies of everything that is needed? Which interpreter will be chosen for the audio or visual component of searches and how might that slant the user's preferences or understanding? What happens when the power goes off? Where does the information we live by go? "Information garbled, try again," "the server has temporarily been int erupted," "that page is no longer available", "your password has been denied", "sorry, that data is virtually unavailable."

Sorry, this is the old person talking and I know rigidity has no place in 2.0 thinking, but I'm not the only person to see that dependence on a monoculture is an invitation to disaster, whether it is lost genetic material for crops or having all our information on how to do everything floating on a wave nowhere special.

I did like hearing that Library 4.0 will absorb, not replace, the early models of library as 'place' and books at books as 'physically tangible printed and bound items that smell and sometimes taste (were one inclined to lick them) of the last user that can be held in the hand, read in bed and read unconnected." The details on that absorption process are a little unclear.

Well, if you are an amoeba and living in two dimensions and one day evolve the capacity to perceive the third dimension, then you are living in it. You have no choice. Cyberspace having been created as almost as another dimension poses the same non-question to humans. We can't not live there. And yes, the idea, library 4.0, the 'pampered experience with information,' and all the ways of accessing the formerly inaccessible sounds so good. I'm sure I'll be there, as always, soaking it up. But I'm not throwing away my books.