Tuesday, November 4, 2008

2.0 Cliques

I talked to my director yesterday afternoon about our Web 2.0 workshop last week. She mentioned being interested in the administrative issues of Web 2.0. One thing she mentioned was the divide between people who have & have not bought into it, and the cliques that must form at larger universities.

This hits a soft spot because I often get frustrated with this being the only "twopointopian" in my library, though several other librarians are heavily involved in keeping up with other technologies (that I don't want anything to do with). I think all of my grad school friends are twopointopians to some degree or other, and I often feel I communicate with them better than I do with the people I'm with face-to-face daily.

I don't think that you have to start your own blog, breathe Facebook, have a Meebo widget on every Web page, and carry around your Blackberry so you can update your Twitter status every 20 minutes. However, this is just a taste of what the future is for libraries. I'm not sure where I draw the line, but I don't understand librarians who stick their head in the sand and don't do anything at all with technology. I guess I don't feel sorry for the people who get left out of the 2.0 cliques unless they're off doing something equivalent, and in that case, they've probably formed their own cliques.

1 comment:

MM said...

I'm doing the state library's commission learning 2.0 program and from what I've read in a lot of the other participant's blogs, a lot of places don't see how it is applicable.

I've read a lot of posts about "we don't have time to use these technologies at our library" and I think part of that is because they are perceived as being "fun" and not work related. Well, they can be "fun" but really a lot of them don't add to our workloads, they just change how the work is done.