Thursday, February 7, 2008

Thing 2 - now that's a lot of information

I just completed Thing 2, which was basically reading about Library 2.0. I'm really glad I did that, because to be honest, I wasn't sure exactly what it was about. But all of the difference perspectives on it helped me to find my own, at least a little bit.
It seems to me that it's going to be imperative to incorporate these online social communities somehow into the library. There's been talk here about setting up a My Space page, or something along those lines, to get the younger demographic more involved. Here's the problem, though:
All of our public computers are filtered, and no one under 17 can have access to the filtered material. That material includes MySpace. How does one go about getting around that? I would be curious to know what other libraries that have MySpace pages have done. My understanding is that filtering is a federal requirement, so how does one get around that catch-22? It's one of things that really got me thinking as I read about all of the 2.0 tools.
I'm very excited to continue on with the Things - some of them I'm somewhat familiar with, and some I've barely even heard of. As far as time to get them done, I agree with Steven Abram, who says that 15 minutes here and there should be utilized for 23 Things. It's great to explore, and it's fun to be able to play and learn about things that could end up being utilized in some form in the library, and make things more user-friendly for the patrons! As long as we don't forget about people who do not embrace technology, and do not accept change, because there are people like that who come to the library, and we can't force them to embrace technology. I see it everyday. We have a self-checkout system that is not quite a year old, and there are still patrons who refuse to try it, simply because they don't want things to change. And we respect and accommodate that, and I think that's important as well.
All for now, on to Thing 3!

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