One half of 2.0 is not 1.0

I went to a presentation yesterday at the Nelinet offices in Southboro Massachusetts - about 30 miles west of Boston. Since I was teaching that night in New Haven and a nasty snow storm was on the way in, I knew that I could only attend half of the session. Too bad because it was absolutely outstanding. The room was packed with librarians who were very interested in this trend, so a lively discussion was the rule of the morning. The trainer, Erin Logsdon, put together a very informative PowerPoint. Here are a few of the highlights.



Erin talked about the difference between 1.0 and 2.0. Personal web pages became blogs. Publication became participation. Most controversially, taxonomy gives way to "Folksonomy."



There has been much discussion about letting patrons tag records in the library catalog - some librarians want to be more like Amazon. Other see this as giving the keys to the inmates. I had never seen a real-world example of this until yesterday. The Ann Arbor District Library has not only opened tagging up to their patrons, but they make it look like something that really works. You can see the results at http://www.aadl.org/catalog. I don't know if this was deliberate, but Erin mentioned the term "cookery" as an LC subject that nobody would think to search. Funny because two of the top 10 tags at Ann Arbor are "Cooking" and "Recipes."

Another new site to me was www.zoho.com - a utility site that organizes all of your microsoft files and has its own word processing and spread sheets. What interested me was the fact that users could set up web conferences on this free site. Last night with snow and sleet rolling in to Connecticut, I made the call to cancel class. If my students had already been signed up with Zoho, we could have just kept going from wherever we happened to be.

She quoted Stephen Colbert's coinage of the term Wikiality - "A reality where, if enough people agree with a notion, it becomes the truth." She then went on to mention a booming wiki for librarians - Library Success - A best practices wiki at http://www.libsuccess.org/index.php?title=Main_Page . With the availability of free wiki sites such as pbwiki.com, there are as many wikis as ideas.