Lately I’ve read some very thought-provoking posts that I’ve wanted to com­ment on at length, but unfor­tu­nately I just don’t have time to do them each the jus­tice they deserve right now. So here’s a starter pack to make you think about them instead.

• Tech­nol­ogy with Alti­tude
  

  “Ron Gard­ner, Con­tentdm spe­cial­ist for OCLC, made the point that libraries are get­ting a lot more involved in the cre­ation that goes on in libraries. It got me think­ing that we are still a lit­tle fix­ated on what comes into the library (meta­data cre­ation, orga­ni­za­tion, even the library web­site) rather than car­ing as much as we should about what goes out.

  In a pro­fes­sion full of human­ists and expert researchers, is it time for us to be think­ing even more about what peo­ple pro­duce in libraries, rather than sim­ply find­ing them the right resources and leav­ing them to their best devices? Could the library pro­fes­sion be a key player in the qual­ity of infor­ma­tion that with or with­out our help is going to wind up avail­able to mil­lions through search and dis­cov­ery mech­a­nisms that are not of our own flaw­less (ahem) design? We’re already play­ing a role in the pro­duc­tion of mass dig­i­ti­za­tion of our exist­ing resources and the cre­ation of dig­i­tal por­tals for our unique resources. Isn’t the next log­i­cal step to be the stew­ards of the things that are cre­ated from access to those things?” [Hec­tic Pace]

  My answer is an emphatic yes, although I believe Andrew is prob­a­bly think­ing about aca­d­e­mic libraries in this con­text. I, how­ever, read it as an exten­sion of what I’ve been say­ing for years about pub­lic libraries. More on this soon, due in part to an inter­est­ing con­ver­sa­tion I recently had with Tay­lor Will­ing­ham.
   

• The Asso­ci­a­ton for Library Ser­vices to Chil­dren is blog­ging away, and it’s home to a great post by Ann Crewd­son about Sec­ond Life, Third Life, Fourth Life….
  

  “Many of us are in denial that we are in the age of dig­i­tal natives. How many times have we walked by peo­ple whom we thought were crazy, only to find out that they have an ear­piece attached to their cell­phone? Watch­ing some­one using the Wii con­troller to jog around Sec­ond Life is even odder only because we’ve never exer­cised that way. Sec­ond Life is just another infor­ma­tion place we can meet these peo­ple and serve them. It doesn’t have to be one world or another. We can strad­dle as many worlds as we want and be all the more infor­ma­tion richer. We can even defeat a 12-year-old at a video game. It’s the same game, dif­fer­ent skin. Sec­ond Life is the inter­net, in a dif­fer­ent form. If we only set our minds to it we can free our­selves of our psy­cho­log­i­cal bar­ri­ers. If I can do it, you can do it too!”

  While I agree with a lot of what Ann says, it’s more the atti­tude that I wanted to note, because more than the tech­ni­cal know-how, that’s what makes “librar­ian 2.0.” It’s the will­ing­ness to play, exper­i­ment, and learn. Had Ann decided Sec­ond Life wasn’t for her or her library, I’d still high­light this post. It’s the folks who write some­thing off with­out even try­ing it (espe­cially while telling oth­ers that “no one needs to do this” or who spend all of 10 min­utes doing some­thing and then are sur­prised when the end result isn’t stel­lar) who work against the best val­ues of our pro­fes­sion. This is true for many things, not just Sec­ond Life or vir­tual worlds. After all, we had this kind of debate around allow­ing email in the library, too, not so long ago.

  If you don’t care, that’s fine. But we now live in a per­ma­nent world of “and,” not “or,” and we can’t each do every­thing. Nor can we all do every­thing. So find your part of the “and,” and see what you can do with it. There’s a whole mess of dig­i­tal honey out there to catch flies with.
   

• If you haven’t already read Karen Schneider’s farewell post on the Tech­Source Blog — Sail­ing On, please do so now. She says a lot of the things that need to be said, and that’s me you see stand­ing behind her, wav­ing my hands in the air and singing “amen.” I can’t choose any one piece to quote, and there’s really noth­ing I can add.

  I can, how­ever, com­ple­ment it with a link to Peter Brantley’s post about Libraries Re-shaping.

  “The tiller of change is advanc­ing on the field, the corn has been har­vested, and the stalks will soon return to the soil. We bet­ter be think­ing about the new crop, or the field will lie fallow.

  I appre­ci­ate the sever­ity of my sug­ges­tions. I think this is a con­ver­sa­tion that libraries should have, openly and vig­or­ously, because half-measures will not suf­fice. I may be wrong in my specifics; an out-of-step trou­ba­dour with atonal music and lyrics in an offen­sive lan­guage. That’s fine. Other and bet­ter learned trou­ba­dours must surely exist to play the music that will capivate.

  Here we go …” [Peter Brantley’s thoughts and spec­u­la­tions]

  Although the post focuses on aca­d­e­mic libraries, I’m going to give away the end­ing because it’s applic­a­ble across the board. It’s also why I’m opti­mistic about libraries and librarians.

  “Why effect these wrench­ing changes?

  Because It’s Time. The librar­i­ans that I have talked with — admit­tedly, they self-select, although they rep­re­sent a cross sec­tion of func­tions — are ready to move for­ward into the future. We know how much things have changed; we’re not kid­ding our­selves. We know there should be fun­da­men­tal trans­for­ma­tion, even if some of us nec­es­sar­ily and self­ishly want its expres­sion to come in just-a-few-more-years. Yet, a bright future beck­ons. It is excit­ing, and we can be part of it. We know it — we have a huge range of skills, and we’re burst­ing with new ideas.“