Tuesday, July 03, 2007

the 2.0

I've just realized that some people might think that my covs2.0 is an homage to Brotherhood2.0, but that wasn't my intention. In fact I didn't think of that connection until a friend mentioned it. My 2.0 was meant to reference the discussions in the world of the library of Library2.0 and Web2.0, which I understand to be the upgrades of these systems into the rest of the world.

Here I am in this class using a Wiki regularly, reading blog posts, discussing servers and FTP...all under the guise of the library! In some ways, it makes me feel really lucky that I decided to become a librarian now, because I am beginning to understand that this "upgrade" is here to stay and so we must alter the way we think about libraries and reconsider what it means to research, to locate information, and to serve patrons.

In all this new technology (and even the old stuff), I still can't get my head around some of it. I can't quite figure out what to do with the "public" aspects of so much of it. If I make a del.icio.us page for my teachers and students, would I need to reconsider what I have on my own, if perchance they found mine? My name is out there now in the blogosphere and interweb. Does 2.0 mean more individual exposure? If so, are we always aware of what image we put out? It makes me think that more of us (but especially schools and libraries and libraries in schools) need publicists. Perhaps social networking is a type of backlash toward the society pages of the 40s, 50s, and 60's. Now there's a thesis for someone? Is social networking more than a society page upgrade?

1 comment:

Linda Braun said...

This public and private nature of things is one thing that I think about a lot. As I mentioned in the Skype calls last week, my Twitter posts are different with students in the mix than they are when it's just friends who know me as me not as their teacher.

Leo Laporte from TWIT - http://www.twit.tv/ - has been talking about this a lot recently. He has lots of social networking accounts but when he joined Facebook recently he decided that that was going to be the one place that he would keep just for his "real" friends. It seems to work well. I'm not on his Facebook but from what he says that really is his private space. He puts things there that the general public shouldn't know and since it's set as private he feels pretty comfortable that the general public doesn't have access.

I think that's how we need to start thinking. We have perhaps many public accounts for students and teachers but then we also have the one place - our home so to speak - that is just for the "real" friends.

Does that make sense?