step #22~the evolution of the library…

1. Lees twee of drie artikelen over Bibliotheek 2.0 uit de bronnenlijst (engels en/of Nederlands). 2. Schrijf een blogpost waarin je je gedachten weergeeft over één van deze artikelen
3.Meld je aan bij de Nederlandse Bibliotheek 2.0 Ning community met je cursusaccountgegevens. 4. Schrijf een blogpost over waarin je iets schrijft over hoe jij tegen Bibliotheek 2.0 aankijkt.

okay so me being i in all my super geekdom glory am convinced that you can make a great parallel between the history of the library and the history of the church. in fact, i am convinced that in some respects the two even go hand in hand. however, i am aware that no one is interested in reading this comparison but me so i will save everyone from extreme boredom and refrain. however, i came to this conclusion while reading the articles about library 2.0 and that the whole idea about library 2.0 being about the evolutionary process of public access. if you think back, even just in library history, that has been a trend from the beginning. moving from monastic libraries to closed stakes to open stakes. library 2.0 seems like the next logical step where we as librarians continue to move from keepers of the information treasure chest to being the tour guides. yeah, we have made several steps towards that already but if the patron still can’t understand our way of doing things then we have to change to meet their needs. and as the times change so do the needs and our way of meeting them need to change too. that doesn’t mean we throw everything we’ve done out the window but it does mean that we need to be open to compromise without compromising our core. i think really the Librarian Manifesto sums it all up very well. it does not at any point say that we as librarians throw our current system out the window but that we let ourselves be receptive to the changes of the world around us and attempt to incorporate those into the library world so that we can continue to do our job effectively. we need to evolve our ideas, our programs and our services in accordance with the desires of the user and changes of their culture while being open to failure, criticism, input, and remaining positive through the whole process. I think that that is basically what we have been doing very slowly over the last few hundred years…normally in response to a crisis of some sort… and now we need to make that step a bit faster to keep up with the extra fast moving people of this time period…and we do this in response to the crisis that if we don’t, we not only stagnate, we find ourselves out of a job. this is where something like bibliotheek 2.0 ning and library 2.0 ning are super handy networks that help us as librarians help each other to track trends, evolve our services and give each other feedback on how we are doing. the evolutionary process is much easier of you do it as a team and not just on your own. Instead of being the single salmon fighting the current you become one of many going with the flow, moving forward together…but don’t worry, at the end of this story you don’t die like the salmon, you evolve to a higher level of service, standards and patron satisfaction. and that is really what being a librarian is all about.