Readin' & 2.0

Assignment #15 On Library 2.0 & Web 2.0 ...

The assigned reading from Next Space: The OCLC Newsletter, No. 2: 2006. "Web 2.0: Where will the next generation Web take libraries?" offers perspectives from 5 different practitioners. Two particularly resonated for me, both relating to the on-line user experience. As one who has been interested in on-line accessibility and usability for a long time, these two are singin' my song.

In "Away from the 'icebergs'," the "Reliance on user education" section says "We need to focus our efforts...on eliminating the barriers that exist between patrons and the information they need, so they can spend as little time as possible wrestling with lousy search interfaces and as much time as possible actually reading and learning....if our services can’t be used without training, then it’s the services that need to be fixed—not our patrons."

A number of points in the piece "To better bibliographic services"
particularly the section "Expose, expand, extend metadata using Web 2.0." We've got to get away from our siloed hard-to-use library catalogs and work to pull in the highly-usable portions that provide a rich browsing/finding experience for patrons such as book covers, reviews, and compressing many records for the same item into one.