Library 2.0

I have heard similar claims to those made by the Library 2.0 guest list previously. The first time was in Library 1972.0 when some big claims were being made for libraries in shoe boxes (every thing was going to be on micro fiche) and for the provision of materials in many different but new formats (tapes, slides or the then new videotape). It reflects a desire to democratise information with, I suppose, the implicit belief that one of the great inequities in the world will thereby be removed.
I also suspect that it reflects the response of libraries to the threat that technology has for a long time posed to the library world. Not unnaturally, the response to this places libraries at the centre of this possible new world. There are a few contentious statements in the Library 2.0 "readings" - Rick Anderson's assertion that there are no longer "hard to get" items so there is no need to keep collections is a bit hard to swallow. Print runs these days are over in nanosceonds and one day Rick should try getting a copy of an old government report from the Web. It is a big claim.

Like previous "new waves" bits of it will be adopted, but probably not in the way that the current propagandists expect, and those bits will probably not be the ones which currently seem most likely. As ever a major problem for organisations such as ours is that, there is a lot of info out there and there are terrific tools for finding it, but unfortunately most of it is ephemeral and the bits that our organisation really does need cost a lot of money and are locked up in specialised databases. The extent to which one can be interactive, democratic and provide everything to everyone is very much limited by the size of the budget and the restrictions in the supplier's agreement.