Tuesday, September 25, 2007

week 6, thing 15: the future of 2.0

The “just in case” collection was an idea raised by Rick Anderson in one of the OCLC newsletter segments.

Since I am collection coordinator at the branch, this idea really resonated with me, especially since we just (well, almost) finished the purge report for this year. How many items showed up on that report, unused in over a year, did we decide to keep "just in case" a student needed a book on that, or "just in case" all of the other titles on Kyrgyzstan are checked out at the moment. Realistically, how many of those do we need, since we are paying beaucoup dollars to have 24-7 (and, more frequently, remote) access to fairly comprehensive electronic sources? Especially now that teachers are not requiring students to bring in solely books for reports or projects - articles from databases are more widely accepted than they were 4 years ago? [for summer reading they still have to read the books, but the non-fiction assignments have gone more electronic...]

I can definitely see a massive reduction in the number of physical volumes in public libraries over the next decade, especially in non-fiction collections. I don't see as many titles falling off in the fiction section because of ebooks. Electronic fiction books seem like companions to the physical volumes, not competitors. That's something I was aware of, but not really working toward. I will try to really challenge myself on this point when doing collection maintenance. Do I see a legitimate need for this item or am I just holding onto it for the rare instance when 40 encyclopedia articles and 100 magazine or newspaper entries will not suffice?


I also am intrigued by the possibilities for user-friendly and/or user-created cataloging - finally, the term "cookery" will burn!





Excerpts from the articles:

The name, as you may guess, is an extension of Web2.0 and shares many of its same philosophies and concepts including harnessing the user in both design and implementation of services, embracing constant change as a development cycle over the traditional notion of upgrades, and reworking library services to meet the users in their space, as opposed to ours (libraries).

wikipedia: especially public libraries, are at a crossroads where many of the elements of Web 2.0 have applicable value within the library community, both in technology-driven services and in non-technology based services. In particular, he described the need for libraries to adopt a strategy for constant change while promoting a participatory role for library users.

rich interactivity, user participation, collective intelligence, self-service, novel and remixed content

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