Part 2 of Library 2.0 Presentation at the Minnesota Association of Law Librarians

I am on the agenda to speak at the Spring Conference for Minnesota Association of Law Librarians. The first of the conference speakers in Shane Nackerud, Web Services Coordinator for the University of Minnesota.

These are my notes on the second part of Shane's presentation on Library 2.0:

How have libraries reacted to the 2.0 movement? Let's look at how other industries have changed: Music industry, travel agencies, book stores, and newspapers are all trying to adjust to the increasing flow if information through the internet. Libraries are also being impacted. The number of visitors to libraries is decreasing. The number of reference requests has dropped dramatically and circulation statistics are down.

A lot of the impact is an impact from the internet. Libraries should compare the search of their catalogs to the Google search.

Libraries 2.0 = [book's stuff + people + radical trust] x participation

Get in the flow. Attention is scarce and resources are abundant. Get into the spaces where the users are. Trying stuff out is cheaper than deciding whether to try it.

Shane has built a plug into Amazon so that it shows that a book is in the U Minn library in the Amazon list. Shane is pushing RSS feeds out to users, including a users circulation. He has building widgets that users can plug into iGoogle and other widget compatible sites.

Libraries are pushing some photos out as a hosting site to display their photograph collection. Another was using flickr to publish book reviews.

He demonstrated McMaster University Library's Web team collection of links they share. MIT reference libraries are pulling delicious tags into their own website.

Shane showed the University of Alberta's Facebook application and Penn State University Libraries Search. They both tie into the library catalogs. Each had less than a 5 active users a day.

Shane pushed out a GreaseMonkey script that plugs into Amazon. If the book is in his catalog, that shows up in his search results. The script came out of the University of Seattle.

Shane started the UThink site that hosts the blogs at the University of Minnesota, the biggest blog collection at an educational institution.

In us new catalog, he returns results based on relevancy. There are also facets to filter the results to refine the result set. The catalog gives the users the ability to add tags to books and items. It seems like the knowledge management issues with enterprise search carry over to libraries. (The audience was very interested in this topic.)

Shane has done some great things with trying to integrate library information into the users workflow and sharing data, rather than keeping the information in a walled environment. At the end he encouraged the audience to play.