Library 2.0: A critical view Howard Rosenbaum [email protected].

Library 2.0: A critical view

Howard [email protected]

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Rosenbaum: Library 2.0 - A critical viewSchool of Library and Information Science @ Indiana University


I. Web 2.0 and Library 2.0, briefly

• A question of origins - Web 2.0

II. Using social informatics

• Library 2.0 is a computerization movement

III. A critical view

• Marketing, determinism and utopianism

IV. Conclusion

• What’s left is useful





The roots of Library 2.0 are in Web 2.0

So what is Web 2.0?www.weblogsinc.com/common/images/3060000000055560.JPG?0.5497399570678874





What is Web 2.0?

It was originally a marketing term introduced in 2004 as

“a useful, if imperfect, conceptual umbrella under which analysts, marketers and other stakeholders in the tech field could huddle the new generation of internet applications and businesses that were emerging to form the ‘participatory Web’”

Madden and Fox (2006). Riding the waves of ‘Web 2.0.’ Pew Internet Life Project.

Developed by Tim O’Reilly and Dale Daugherty who turned it into a source of revenue and a meme





Web .01: linking pages into a network of digital resources

Web 1.0: publishing content and facilitating communication among people

Web 2.0: linking people into groups that cooperate, collaborate, and compete (and spend money)

www.avidos.net/detalles/imagenes/web20revolution.jpg





Web 2.0 has become

A new “user-driven” approach to to using the web

A category of new technologies

A type of company that is trying to take advantage of the first two characteristics

The focus: providing services rather than products

The services tend to be built around concepts of community and collaboration

The goal: active and involved people using the service





are needed to see this picture.

A new approach to using the web

www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html





Web 2.0 is a new way to use the web: an attitude not a technology

Rely on the collective wisdom of the crowd

Provide a rich user experience

Trust your users and let them control their own data

Build for the hedonic impulse: playfulness, hackability

Assume that software improves the more people use it

Give people the right to remix with some rights reserved





Web 2.0 technologies share other characteristics

Harnessing the collective intelligence

Google uses the link structure of the web

Amazon uses people’s reviews of their products

Ebay uses people’s willingness to engage in commerce

Flikr and de.li.cious use people’s ability to classify their artifacts taking others into account

Wikipedia uses people’s desire to exchange their knowledge with and trust in each other

These are network effects that are a source of value






Library 2.0 has its roots in Web 2.0 thinking

static.zooomr.com/images/c84cc4864d4e3e5b13a3e1d36291e7e14e8f3de9.jpg




The heart of Library 2.0 is user-centered change. It is a model for library service that encourages constant and purposeful change, inviting user participation in the creation of both the physical and the virtual services they want, supported by consistently evaluating services.

It also attempts to reach new users and better serve current ones through improved customer-driven offerings … however, it is through the combined implementation of all of these that we can reach Library 2.0.Casey and Savastinuk (2006). http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6365200.html





Library 2.0 simply means making your library's space (virtual and physical) more interactive, collaborative, and driven by community needs. Examples of where to start include blogs, gaming nights for teens, and collaborative photo sites. The basic drive is to get people back into the library by making the library relevant to what they want and need in their daily lives...to make the library a destination and not an afterthought.Houghton (2005). http://librarianinblack.typepad.com/librarianinblack/2005/12/index.html





Library 2.0 is partially a response to a post-Google world

It requires internal reorganization in a library

It requires a fundamental change in a library’s mission

It requires a fundamental change in handling authority

It requires technological agility (“the fact of the matter is that technology is L2’s impetus”)

It challenges library orthodoxy on almost every level

It requires a radical change in the way ILSs and vendors work (openness)Blyberg (2006) http://www.blyberg.net/2006/01/09/11-reasons-why-library-20-exists-and-matters/





It requires a radical change in the way ILSs and vendors work (openness)

It both enables and requires libraries to work together

It is actually happening (gaming programs, IM reference, coffee shops)

It is revolutionary

It is essential for survival/pertinence

L2 is not an option. If we don’t acknowledge the weighty significance of L2, we will not just be running the risk of sliding into obscurity, we just won’t be that important to society. We will become the functional equivalent of back-room storage full of green hanging-file-folder boxesBlyberg (2006)





“Library 2.0” is hype, a bandwagon, a confrontation, a negative assertion about existing libraries, their viability, their relevance, and their lack of changes, and — astonishingly — an apparent claim that two months of discussion by a two or three dozen bloggers makes a Movement that is so important that every library, no matter how small, must be discussing it right now, and that every library association should be focusing its next conference on the Movement.Crawford 2007


But wait!





~or~

So … Library 2.0…

What do you think?










IV. Conclusion









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A computerization movement is a social movement

A “collective enterprise to establish a new order of life”

“[It] … takes on the character of a society. It acquires organization and form, a body of customs and traditions, established leadership, an enduring division of labor, social rules and social values – in short, a culture, and a new scheme of life”

Blumer (1951; 8)





Computerization movements depend on collective action

They stand in two relations to the social order

Revolutionary: attempt to change the order

Reform: attempt to change a restricted domain within the order

There are two types

General: societal in scope

Specific: submovements within a general movement





They also involve a

“Struggle over the production and counter-production of ideas and meanings associated with collective action”

Iacono and Kling (1998; 6)

They have trajectories

To persist, they require organizational structures

These allow people to engage in collective action:

“They can raise money, mobilize resources, hold meetings and formulate positions” (Iacono and Kling, 1995; 5)





Components:

A core ICT or ICTs

Organizational structures: CM organizations

Collective action

Public discourse; technological framing

Ideology and myths: revolutionary and reform

Organizational practices

Historical trajectory

Types: general and specific

Organized opposition: Counter CMs






As a computerization movement, Library 2.0 depends on the social actors and groups whose collective actions shape and propel CMs

Activists, professional associations, academics, technology writers, journalists, vendors, policy

makers, administrators, front-line people

It originates in a time and place, gathers momentum, and then follows one of several paths

It has an ideology of revolution or reform based on a deeply held belief that the core ICTs can cause fundamental positive social change





Library 2.0 has an ideology where actors engage in

“organized, insurgent action to displace or overcome the status quo and establish a new way of life” (Kling and Iacono, 1994; 17; Iacono and Kling, 1995; 5)

Within a CM, activists and advocates claim that core ICTs will “bring about a new social order”

(Kling and Iacono, 1994; 4)

This is accomplished by technological framing and shaping of public discoursewww.librarian.net/talks/larc/l2dum.jpg





Library 2.0 has a technological frame that contains socially constructed meanings ascribed to specific technologies

It connects relevant actors and the particular ways in which they understand a technology as ‘working’(Iacono and Kling, 1998; 6)

Framing “describes the actions and interactions of actors, explaining how they socially construct a technology” (Bijker, 2001:15526)





While the frame is developing, the ICT that is its focus is interpretively flexible

Over time the frame is built up in professional and public discourse and fixes (relatively), the meaning of the movement’s core ICTs

It shapes public discourse and perceptions and simplifies complex information for external audiences

Technological frames and the public discourse may actually “misrepresent actual practice for long periods of time” (Iacono and Kling, 1998; 8)










IV. Conclusion







www.says-it.com/badge/sheriff.php libraryzen.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2006/09/WindowsLiveWriter/LibraryZen Launched_1247C/snakeoil553-thumb%5B10%5D.jpg





The discourse about Library 2.0 reflects the “triumphalism of Web 2.0 proponents”

Has been adapted from Web 2.0, which began as a marketing term to sell products and services

Leads to technological determinism

“Contextualized within familiar tropes of treating technology as semiautonomous, monolithic, discrete, and ahistorical”

Changes in libraries are driven by technological innovation

Scott. (2007) Bubble 2.0: Online Organized Critique of Web 2.0





Technological determinism underlies a lot of vendor and evangelist discourse

Leads to a rush to acquire and implement tools

Especially if open source

Entranced by shiny things

How can we use these technologies?

Not: how will these technologies help meet needs or improve services

What are the costs of the implementation and use of Library 2.0 technologies?







ticklebooth.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/08/treadmill-dance-1.jpg





Also leads to technological utopianism

The transformative power of technology brings about positive social change

Often accompanied by an assumption that this is inevitable

Library 2.0 as involving “collaborative uses of technologies” with “participatory, egalitarian, and democratic potential”

It will make libraries relevant by empowering patrons who will shape the institution

Scott (2007)





The discourse of Library 2.0 is decidedly utopian

Another example of of exuberant irrationality around different types of Web 2.0 technologies

User control as a “paradigm shift” affecting the people who use it socially, culturally, and politically

How the discourse is shaped

Evangelist forecasts and predictions, hyperbolic advertising and marketing, fictional narratives, and popular news stories regarding technologies

These become evidence for cultural projection about organizational transformation





There are also problems with the term

Describes “a cluster of new applications and related online cultures”

It has conceptual unity to the extent that we can find significant shared socio-technical characteristics

Utopian claims: “reworking hierarchies, changing social divisions, creating possibilities and opportunities, informing us, and reconfiguring our relations with objects, spaces and each other”

Beer, D. and Burrows, R. (2007). Sociology and, of and in Web 2.0: Some Initial Considerations. Sociological Research Online, 12(5) http://www.socresonline.org.uk/12/5/17.html





www.daden.co.uk/pages/000395.html





To sum up:

Library 2.0 is a contested term:

Can easily lead to a technological determinist conception of 21st century libraries

Turning librarians into technicians ~or~ moving you further back from your patrons

Moves library space into the network and away from physical space

Library management becomes influenced by the “wisdom of the crowd”











IV. Conclusion





IV. Conclusion

What’s left is useful

Information goes from private devices into the network

It can be accessed from mobile and desktop interfaces anytime and anywhere

What are the implications of this expansion of the public domain for libraries?

There is a range of interesting tools

How can they be used to improve services?

How can they be used make the patron experience more engaging?




IV. Conclusion

There is clearly online collaboration and sharing

People taking shared responsibility for publishing terabytes of knowledge about themselves, the network, and their worlds

Observing others, expanding the network, making “friends”, editing and updating content, blogging, remixing, sharing, responding, exhibiting, tagging…

Do these represent new information behaviors and needs?

How can libraries respond?




IV. Conclusion

Research attention

How Library 2.0 discourse is shaped and maintained

The impact on organizational structure and culture

How it is changing the profession

The formation of new hierarchies and social divisions

The problems and subversions afforded by the collaborative culture

Understanding patterns of social participation

The creation of new elites




IV. Conclusion



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Patron 2.0 - get ready!




Why the context matters: A social informatics approach to the

problem of interdependence in information systems research

Howard Rosenbaum Elisabeth DavenportIndiana University Napier University

[email protected] [email protected]

http://www.slis.indiana.edu/hrosenba/www/Pres/ais_06/index.html


Howard [email protected]



www.slis.indiana.edu/hrosenba/www/pres/iacrl_07/index.html

Library 2.0: A critical view Howard Rosenbaum [email protected].

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Transcript of Library 2.0: A critical view Howard Rosenbaum [email protected].