#15 on Library 2.0 & Web 2.0

I have decide to copy and paste for me to read another time. It is too complicate for me to understand i hope it worked..we'll see.
Away from the “icebergs”
Row your library boat into the Web 2.0 environment
I don’t think there’s any question that we librarians are working hard, with the best intentions, to serve our patrons well in a world that has changed dramatically in the last decade. If the profession is a boat, then I think we’re all rowing pretty heroically. But I’m not sure we’re paying enough attention to the potential disasters that lie in our current path. In particular, there are three “icebergs” that I believe pose significant threats to our future success. All are remnants of a bygone information age, practices and attitudes that no longer make sense but which we have difficulty letting go. Our patrons have no such qualms, of course, as the emergence of Web 2.0 demonstrates. The “icebergs” that I see threatening our progress, indeed our existence, are these:
The “just in case” collection Crazy as this may sound, the time has come for us to look skeptically at the very idea of a library “collection.” Building a comprehensive collection of materials that anticipates the user’s every need (without providing wastefully where no need exists) has always been problematic, but it was an approach that made sense when information was available only in print formats, and was therefore difficult, expensive and slow to distribute. 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. As a Web 2.0 reality continues to emerge and develop, our patrons will expect access to everything – digital collections of journals, books, blogs, podcasts, etc. You think they can’t have everything? Think again. This may be our great opportunity.
Reliance on user education Libraries are poorly equipped and insufficiently staffed for teaching. Ask yourself what your patron-to-librarian ratio is (at the University of Nevada it’s about 680 to 1) and then ask yourself how you’re going to train all those patrons. We need to focus our efforts not on teaching research skills but on eliminating the barriers that exist between patrons and the information they need, so they can spend as little time as possible wrestling with lousy search interfaces and as much time as possible actually reading and learning. Obviously, we’ll help and educate patrons when we can, and when they want us to, and the more we can integrate our services with local curricula, the better. But if our services can’t be used without training, then it’s the services that need to be fixed—not our patrons. One-button commands, such as Flickr’s “Blog This,” and easy-to-use programs like Google Page Creator, offer promising models for this kind of user-centric service.
The “come to us” model of library service There was a time, not very long ago, when libraries exercised something close to monopoly power in the information marketplace. During the print era, if you wanted access to pricey indexes or a collection of scholarly journals, you had no choice but to make a trip to the library. It wasn’t a good system, but it worked. Sort of. That is to say, it worked moderately well for those privileged with access to a good library. In the post-print era, libraries no longer have the monopoly power that they had in the days before the Internet. We have to be a bit more humble in the current environment, and find new ways to bring our services to patrons rather than insisting that they come to us—whether physically or virtually. At a minimum, this means placing library services and content in the user’s preferred environment (i.e., the Web); even better, it means integrating our services into their daily patterns of work, study and play.
No profession can survive if it throws its core principles and values overboard in response to every shift in the zeitgeist. However, it can be equally disastrous when a profession fails to acknowledge and adapt to radical, fundamental change in the marketplace it serves. At this point in time, our profession is far closer to the latter type of disaster than it is to the former. We need to shift direction, and we can’t wait for the big ship of our profession to change course first. It’s going to have to happen one library—one little boat—at a time.
Web 2.0 Into a new world of librarianship