The con­cept of “Library 2.0″ has been around long enough now that we’ve gone through all the stages and argued it to death, as noticed by Andy Wood­worth in a post titled Decon­struct­ing Library 2.0. That’s a good thing, and you should go read his thoughts on the subject.

No mat­ter which side you of the debate you come down on, you can prob­a­bly prove your case. Me? I agree with Andrew Burkhardt when he notes, “The time has come for libraries to be social on the web. Social is the new nor­mal. It has become main­stream and peo­ple expect it. Library 2.0 is not dead, it has just become bor­ing and com­mon­place. And to quote Clay Shirky, ‘Tools don’t get socially inter­est­ing until they get tech­no­log­i­cally boring.’ ”

In his paper Par­tic­i­pa­tory Net­works: The Library As Con­ver­sa­tion, Dave Lankes said that “libraries should focus on the phe­nom­ena made pos­si­ble by the tech­nol­ogy,” not the tech­nol­ogy itself, which I think is a pretty good way of think­ing about “Library 2.0.” Maybe that’s where we are now, which would be a great way to con­tinue the dis­cus­sion, hope­fully with­out the moniker. I think sev­eral of us thought that’s what we were doing, but it didn’t come across that way.

The hard part, though, is that Library 2.0 doesn’t really replace any­thing. Like so many library ser­vices, the oppor­tu­ni­ties these new tools afford us are in addi­tion to every­thing we’re already doing, which causes prob­lems, because we don’t get addi­tional resources to imple­ment them. To serve as many of your users as pos­si­ble, you have to be in as many of the places where they are as pos­si­ble. That prin­ci­ple has been the phi­los­o­phy behind this site from day one, eight years ago. That means being out in your com­mu­nity phys­i­cally and dig­i­tally, and that’s one of the pieces of L2 that I think was never ade­quately explained.

We’re already pretty good at get­ting out from behind the phys­i­cal ref­er­ence desk. We know how to do it, and we know how we could do it bet­ter given more resources. I worry that this is less true in the online world, and that’s where I always hoped L2 would help. As much as I sup­port, love, and advo­cate for user-centered plan­ning and design, my big regret about the whole “move­ment” is that it hasn’t focused more on how L2 helps staff.

So that’s what I tend to con­cen­trate my own pre­sen­ta­tions on — the prac­ti­cal ways in which these new tools can help you. I’ve been a big pro­moter of RSS since 2002, and I still don’t under­stand why libraries don’t use it more. Yes, one of the ben­e­fits of syn­di­cat­ing con­tent is that your users can sub­scribe to it, but equally impor­tant for me is that it allows me as an orga­ni­za­tion to get my con­tent off my web­site so that it’s more vis­i­ble where my users are. Most impor­tantly, it auto­mates that process so that I don’t have to spend pre­cious resources man­u­ally updat­ing a mul­ti­tude of sites, inevitably for­get­ting about one of them. The fact that I can syn­di­cate lists of new mate­ri­als from my OPAC any­where with­out human inter­ven­tion? Priceless.

Why should your library have a blog? There are many ben­e­fits, but my biggest rea­son is because it gets your cur­rent news and announce­ments in a syn­di­cated for­mat, the dis­play of which you can auto­mate any­where. You can eas­ily recy­cle your con­tent to Twit­ter, Face­book, else­where on your web­site, and more. Talk about a great way to get out into your com­mu­nity — how about dis­play­ing your cur­rent news on the vil­lage, park dis­trict, school, or a depart­ment web­site with­out any ongo­ing effort on your part? That’s a huge win-win in my book. And as some­one who man­u­ally gen­er­ated archives for daily posts before there were “blogs,” let me just sing the praises of auto­matic archiv­ing for a moment. If you’re not using a blog for press release-like infor­ma­tion, do not pass go. There’s a bet­ter way that makes you more effi­cient and has all of these ancil­lary ben­e­fits with cher­ries on top.

Being able to offer inex­pen­sive options for chat ref­er­ence so that you can con­cen­trate on imple­men­ta­tion rather than bud­get? Win. Being able to embed that chat win­dow on your web­site, in data­bases, on Face­book, etc., with­out a huge effort? Win times one mil­lion. Putting imme­di­ate, syn­chro­nous access to a librar­ian back into the cat­a­log by embed­ding a chat win­dow there? Win times infinity.

Hav­ing easy-to-use alter­nate announce­ment chan­nels where you can also talk with and hear from your users (eg, Twit­ter)? Full of win. Same thing with social book­mark­ing (deli­cious — all of your library’s book­marks in one place, search­able, embed­d­a­ble), social pic­tures (Flickr, where you no longer have to worry about resiz­ing images), wikis (cheap intranet pos­si­bil­i­ties), embed­d­a­ble sub­ject guides with syn­di­ca­tion (LibGuides), and more. They all have the poten­tial to make your job eas­ier. How often does that happen?

So, Andy is right to ask ques­tions about Library 2.0 and reflect about its impact, as are the com­menters on his post. For me, though, one place L2 has failed is in mak­ing staff under­stand that these tools can offer big ben­e­fits for them, not just library users. If we’re adopt­ing tools to make our­selves more effi­cient (which I think is the best way to eval­u­ate imple­men­ta­tion for staff), then that counts as suc­cess in my view. If it reaches new users, offers new ser­vices for exist­ing mem­bers, or makes things bet­ter in gen­eral for users at the same time, then we’re really doing some­thing right. That piece is more dif­fi­cult to mea­sure, which makes the L2 debate some­what moot, since no one can really prove or dis­prove it. But when done well, Library 2.0 should help you in your job, too.

I hope we see more arti­cles and pre­sen­ta­tions about that, instead of rehash­ing point­less and divi­sive debates about names, gen­er­a­tions, and “sides.”