The Next 2.0
By Joseph Janes
American Libraries Columnist
Assistant Professor, Information School, University of Washington.
intlib@ischool.washington.edu
Column for June/July 2006
General Motors may be in trouble today, but in 1939 the automaker understood the future. GM even said so, on buttons given to people leaving its Futurama exhibit (not to be confused with the all-too-short-lived animated series) at the New York World’s Fair. Those buttons made a powerful statement: “I have seen the future.” We got planned communities, to be sure; but instead of the sleek, streamlined, slightly creepy ones envisioned through GM’s corporate necromancy, with their automatic cars and burnished towers, we have SUVs, suburban sprawl, and telecommuting.
Predicting the future is dicey business; you almost never quite get what you expected. Thus preparing for it is equally fraught, especially in a profession that is inherently (and necessarily) conservative in nature—when the human record is at stake, you ought to tread carefully and thoughtfully.
There’s been considerable recent discussion of a couple of 2.0s of late: Web 2.0 and its wacky neighbor, Library 2.0. If you feel bad that you’ve heard of these but don’t understand them, the line forms to the left; if you just plain haven’t heard of them, maybe you should get out more.
As far as I can tell, both are still fuzzy and developing concepts. Technology author Tim O’Reilly wrote last fall that Web 2.0 gravitates around a number of concepts, many of which involve collaboration, contribution, decentralization, and participation (think BitTorrent, Wikipedia, AdSense, blogs, and Flickr). Among a list of core competencies of Web 2.0 companies, he lists trusting users as codevelopers and harnessing collective intelligence.
In the April issue of the electronic journal D-Lib, Paul Miller casts the idea of Library 2.0 in the context of “disruptive change,” part of a growing desire to access data “by means other than traditional human interaction with an application’s web interface” and a willingness to share data and combine data sources to “discover new value.” Think of a user searching for a book in Amazon and automatically discovering that the local library holds it, or exposing library holdings seamlessly within course-management software.
What to teach?
I honestly can’t tell you whether either of those really will amount to anything or if they’re just so much hot air. Then again, they might be the latest instances of sudden innovations—PCs, CD-ROMs, the internet—that none of us really foresaw, planned, or budgeted for and yet transformed libraries and librarianship.
So to make ready for this emerging future, what do we teach? That has bedeviled the library education crowd for decades, all the way back to the Williamson report in the ’20s, when the professional, public library–based training programs closed up shop in favor of university-based preparation, which was seen as preferable because of its basis in the conceptual rather than the day-to-day.
It’s easy to say there’s a crisis in library education; there has been for about 80 years. I used to teach classes on microcomputer hardware, programming, use of application software, and the internet (and, once, Gopher, if I’m being totally forthcoming), and several classes that built and maintained the Internet Public Library. All those were successful in their own way, and most seem quaint or even antediluvian today.
The future does often seem to produce a mixture of the new and the familiar. These ideas crystallized for me when I bought a Futurama button on Ebay, the world’s largest flea market, last week—from a seller about two miles from my tiny hometown, a continent away from my current home of Seattle.
Thus, on we move, trying to give appropriate respect to what has come and lessons that lie therein, and what seems to be emerging. This quarter, in my reference class, students are constructing pathfinders and discussing the deeper meaning of Wikipedia, with much in between; that combination seems about right to me.
Should we be teaching XML, syndication, podcasting skills? Maybe. Cataloging? Of course. Programming, internet protocols? Why not? You never know what might come in handy someday. There’s always another 2.0.
In an uncertain and rapidly changing world, I’d think we’d want and need more options, more possibilities, more experimentation in education, not less. Not in an unfettered or aimless way, naturally, but taking advantage of the breadth of experience and perspectives of our schools and faculties—the sorts of things our field has always drawn on to advance and grow.
Many of you will be reading this in New Orleans, a city coming to terms with a 2.0 of its own. It’s unclear what shape that will take and what their future holds—an uncertainty that we can all relate to in our own ways . . . but that’s another story.
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