In keeping with the blog discussion from last week,I thoroughly enjoyed the article Library 2.0: revolution or evolution in that it suggested a couple different ways to think about the way technology and social media is "changing" the library.
Thinking of library changes as a revolution requires one to assume that libraries and librarians need to adapt totally new and foreign practices in order to stay relevant in today's world. They need to learn and take on tasks that have been completely foreign to the job before now. Although it could be argued that the different forms of social media and the ways in which we access information, electronically, for example, are completely new, the general system of storing and retrieving information is not. Not only is the act of storing and retrieving information not new, but, over the years, the methods used to store and retrieve have also changed - this isn't the first time.
I would like to think of Library 2.0 as an evolution. I believe that the ideas behind integrating new technologie and social media into libraries is to find and share information - something that describes the very purpose for a libraries existance in the first place. Of course these new methods are changes to an existing way of doing things, but, in my opinion, they will only enhance the overall experience of information sharing found within libraries.
Just to play devil's advocate...have we allowed our users to sort and retrieve information according to their own tags before? We'll get to that later in the semester...and like I said, I'm just trying to promote discussion here.
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