Friday, November 7, 2008

Change Pirate Day 7: Post #10

#15 On Library 2.0 & Web 2.0 ...

"But it no longer makes sense to collect information products as if they were hard to get. They aren’t. In fact, it may no longer make sense to “collect” in the traditional sense at all. In my library, we’ve seen a 55 percent drop in circulation rates over the past twelve years, making it harder and harder to justify the continued buildup of a large “just in case” print collection." -from Here.

I would love to encourage, somehow, that libraries act as an organism rather than a cold, angry place of research.
Think of how libraries are interpreted as in the media, in movies, books and comics... then ask yourself how you want it to be.
For me personally a library was a place of discovery, adventure, and comfort. Didn't have friends? The bookshelves were always there to engage me. Moved to a new town/city/country? The dewey decimal system always made sense regardless of the language spoken by those who worked there. Bored at looking out over the dull, lifeless plains of snow over a 100 miles from the nearest walmart? In the library I could explore another planet, another life, another perspective.
The challenge is to get that sense of adventure, wonder and excitement off the shelves and into people's minds, so that they look at this place as more than just a building with shelves and library staff that sit behind their desks waiting to yell at the slightest sound.
In this changing society and technological age, staff needs to be trained in helping people to understand not only how to point and click properly with a mouse, but how to explain in laymans terms what it is to point and click...or how to explain the layout of a website in order to navigate it.... like comparing the internet to a city, as a coworker pointed out to me. A city with lots of houses with different kinds of information in each one of them....

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