My sitemeter tells me that people have started checking out my site over the last view days. If I am reading the data correctly, I have to thank Steven M. Cohen at Library Stuff for finding my blog and adding it to a post titled Tons of New to Me Library Blogs. A few people were also driven here by the bookmark on Library Things del.icio.us account. A few folks came in through searches for items tagged “Library 2.0”. No matter how you got here, thank you for checking out my blog and I encourage you to subscribe to my feed.
I was hoping my tags in flickr, del.icio.us, etc. would bring people to check out my Academic Library 2.0 Concept Model. At my first job out of university, I worked as a Reference Technician at the Northborough Free Library. It was there that I got a full sense of how libraries foster community. I was impressed with how the library brought people together through both formal (book discussion groups, teen programs, etc.) and informal (public access computers, the daily newspaper, etc.) means. Since then, one of my main goals has been to devise ways to translate this sense of community into the online environment.
While digital collections seemed to be developing rapidly, the accompanying digital communities seemed to be lagging behind. Though my current model only addresses academic libraries, I am currently developing parallel models for public libraries and cultural institutions in general. It is my hope that these models will demonstrate the importance of Library 2.0 and at the same time inspire new and creative services. As the term Library 2.0 implies, looking to how Web 2.0 companies have succeeded in encouraging community and harnessing collectively intelligence is certainly one of the first steps librarians must take to accomplish this goal.
library 2.0web 2.0 academiclibrary20