Library 2.0

To me in the world of libraries any new development has almost always been evolutionary. I believe deeply we have to continuously align, change and leverage technology and the new way of managing information to our users requirement. And I also believe to give something extra to provoke our users to use new technology and thinking in using our facilities – services, products and the place. So far I have been trying to do that. That is why I was glad that I stumbled upon the debate/discussion on the concept of Library 2.0 in the west. I admit I am already late on this one as there were bunch of discussions on it and so far it was best captured by Walt Crawford in his Prologue Library 2.0 and “Library 2.0”. In the end he just confirmed my thinking about the whole thing. Blogs, wiki, Technorati, del.li.cious, Flikr, Fotopages, Podcast and RSS are no doubt great technologies and concepts but what matters to us is how we best apply them for our environment. First we need to know what they are before we do anything. The thing is we have to continuously learn and keep abreast with the new development around us and find the best way to apply them to improve ourselves and our library to serve our clients better. I plan to do a series of blogs on all the technologies I have mentioned above separately.