Friday, July 31, 2009
Web 2.0 and Libraries
I decided to do my paper on web 2.0 and how it is affecting school libraries. It was interesting to see the positives and negatives people feel these tools have had on libraries. For the most part, many of the blogs and articles I found were focused on the positive aspects of web 2.0. They sung the phrases of many things: how inexpensive these tools are, how easy they are to learn no matter how old one is, and how it keeps the library more relevant with its' patrons. It was much harder to find articles on the negatives of web 2.0. One article I read, "Web 2.0 and You", by Donna Baumbach, had done a survey of 631 librarians, asking them about web 2.0. The survey cited that four major obstacles occurred when it came to thinking about web 2.0: tools being inaccessible at school, little time to experiment with these tools, non-relevant training and basic lack of knowledge. Obviously, after taking two semesters already in the UCD program, I know that most everyone is loving the web 2.0 products, myself included. But I came to the realization at the end of my research that at least with myself, it is important to find a happy median between using web 2.0 tools with your community all the time, and still giving them that personal, face to face interaction.
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Digitization and the Future
This is supposed to be a separate posting, not a response to Web 2.0 and Libraries. But I couldn't figure out how to do that.
I did my paper on the digitization of books and primary sources. Part of my focus was the Library of Congress' American Memories Digitization Project, which is working on digitizing thousands of primary sources across the country. I also looked at Googles attempts to digitize the collections of several libraries in the U.S. and England. This will amount to millions of resources when they are finished.
The positives of these digitization projects outweigh the negatives, I think. They will give people access to many works that they might never have seen otherwise. Access to primary sources for students is invaluable for research assignments and for learning in general. And the attempts to digitize out-of-print and other rare books will make these resources accessible to more people.
One of the big negatives centers around copyright laws and whether these digitization projects have the legal right to copy all these resources. Google is in the midst of several court cases right now, related to this very issue.
It does seem, though, that digitization is the way we are headed for many resources. It makes sense economically, as the scanning process gets easier and paper becomes scarcer. It obviously makes sense environmentally as well. And because most of today's students are more interested in computers than textbooks, it is a trend that will probably gain in popularity even more.
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