Building Library 3.0: Issues in Creating a Culture of Participation

Citation

Mason, D. (2010), "Building Library 3.0: Issues in Creating a Culture of Participation", The Electronic Library, Vol. 28 No. 2, pp. 347-348. https://doi.org/10.1108/02640471011033710

It is commonly accepted that the information revolution has changed libraries forever. Over the last three decades the combination of personal computer, the Internet and online databases has transformed the information environment that libraries operate in. Libraries have mostly adapted to the new environment, but have done so in ways that reflect traditional library functions. As long as the internet was seen as a passive resource then libraries could continue their traditional functions of providing access, quality control and identifying resources for patrons. Evans likens that approach to treating the internet as just an online version of the card catalogue. In the world of Web 1.0 information was static, hard to find, restricted, sanitized.

Web 2.0 is totally different. Now patrons expect to be able to write comments to each other on the card catalogue, to add new cards themselves, to have multiple ways of sorting, storing and retrieving cards. They want natural language access. They want to be able to know which cards they looked at before, which cards their friends are using, which cards are good, they want to be able to tear bits off the cards and keep them, to extract their own card catalogue, and they want to mix emails and movies and songs in with the cards, and they want everything available 24 hours a day right in your hand. Few libraries come anywhere near addressing this.

Web 3.0 is even more chaotic. Patrons expect to be able to have their own writings included, automatically to combine material, to create their own unique repositories and to share these with others.

If libraries are to maintain their roles as the guardians of knowledge, as the first place to go for information, then the library is going to have become an integral part of the new library user's personal, personalized and interactive web space. The library has to be part of their social scene. This means embracing the new technologies and learning how to integrate them into the professional service.

This book sets out to suggest how this can be done. It is deliberately called ‘Library 3.0’ to emphasis how things are changing and will continue to change. It starts with the flagship technology of Web 2.0, blogs. Blogs are the exact‐opposite of traditional libraries – they are colourful, noisy, free wheeling, opinionated, interactive, open, uncensored and free. Web 2.0 is a collection of ideas, rather than technologies. The main themes are participation, tagging and syndication. Syndication brings the web to the user. The challenge is to design a new library service around these principles. In Library 3.0 the library comes to the patron, it is proactive and interactive. The rest of the book describes the various technologies that can empower the library to do this.

The style of the book is to assume very little prior knowledge and shows the reader where to get free resources for hands‐on experience of each technology. The chapters outline the fundamental concepts behind the most popular applications on the social web, such as del.icio.us, Friendster, Facebook, MySpace, etc. There is a chapter on Second Life that considers what a library in a virtual world like Runescape might look like. It then discusses the effect of mobile web devices and some of the newest technologies such as QR code. Each technology is considered from the point of view of what it can do, and how libraries need to respond to them.

The argument of the book is not that these technologies and environments are good or bad, or even useful, but that they are how customers now experience their reality and that people now expect libraries to join them in this reality. This is a well‐written and thoughtful book that will challenge every library to reconsider its role in the ongoing information revolution.