Just heard Patrick Danowski, a young librarians from the State Library of Berlin, give an enthusaistic talk at IFLA. He is a Library 2.0 evangelist and talked about using Web 2.0 principles in libraries — being interactive and allowing for user contributions and feedback. He has been involved with the German Wikipedia. He talked about Wikisource, a community portal and repository of public domain texts using a wiki community, and Citeulike, a free online service to organise references to academic papers of interest and share them with others. HIs final words:
* users can support the work of librarians
* libraries have to build platforms for them to do so
* we have to be open for user contributions and ready to share.
AND, Patrick is pushing IFLA 2.0 and has just started an IFLA Library 2.0 interest group and wiki.
South African storyteller Gcina Mhlope, also known as the Mother of Books, moderated the opening ceremonies at the World Library & Information Congress. The hit of the morning was Justice Albie Sachs of the Constitutional Court of South Africa who lost an arm and an eye in a bomb attack while he was in exile during apartheid. He dedicated his talk to the librarian who provided books to him while he was imprisoned even though he never met her and she didn’t know the books were going to him. He said, “The librarian was just doing her job but she was illuminating and providing access to a world that might not have existed…. magical.” He was showed a video about the building of the new court building and library. It was great to hear him say, “Judges march on our libraries.” He talk about three types of libraries:
* Libraries walk around on legs — they are people with an oral tradition — “I am a library” — we should be recording our experiences
* Libraries as havens — a place of illumination, safety, gathering and conversing in your own langugage — a place to dream
* Libraries you can’t see — the virtual library and all the things that internet provides access to
Isn’t interesting how things come together? Here I am in Cape Town in winter (more like the fall weather in Toronto) at the IFLA preconference workshop for Library and Research Services for Parliaments in the parliament building of South Africa. In late May I was at the CLA conference in Newfoundland (which really felt like winter)wher a number of colleagues saw icebergs. In Cape Town, I saw penguins the other day. And today, Moira Fraiser, New Zealand Parliamentary Librarian & Group Manager, Information & Knowledge, mentioned a new book on change by John Kotter, Our Iceberg is Melting. The book talks about how change happens to everyone and that everyone can lead change. It uses penguins and their melting icebergs to get the points across. Icebergs, penguins, and change — a theme for me this year!
We always knew it, but now the research confirms it: people spend half their time on the web viewing “content” - videos, news, “stuff” (as I so articulately call it….”text” seems rather presumptuous). Interesting implications for libraries……the clients are there, ready to view, watch and read…..do they know that the library is there with “stuff” to view, watch and read? Are they connected with the library’s website from a search engine? (there’s a 35% increase in search engine use too). Unfortunately, it’s pretty rare that a public library site comes up in a search engine listing unless an individual is specifically looking for the library. How often are libraries optimizing their sites and ensuring their tags are getting picked up by the engines? Well, people want “stuff” to view, and the libraries have it….so now on to the work of getting the library “stuff” picked up by the engines.
What does the Nielsen/NetRatings research show is decreasing? E-mail (no surprise) and time on commerce sites. And, as we also suspected, IM is increasing too. Personally (and professionally), I rely on IM for quick chats with colleagues and kids, turning first to my phone and only, failing that, to e-mail.
