Thing 2 - Web 2.0

My time is pretty much taken up with Web and Library 1.0. I love recommending books for students to read, and I buy books that they recommend to me. I'd rather spend my day teaching kids to work with photos and video than writing a blog. I enjoy collaborating with teachers on resources for student projects. Interestingly enough, it is two of our youngest teachers who are most insistent that students have both print and Internet resources for their projects.

That's not to say, however, that I don't see that "the times, they are a-changing." (Why else would I be participating in this event?) I have only to watch my 18-year-old son to know that our generations are separated by more than years. We both have phones: I talk; he texts. We both listen to music: I use the stereo; he uses his iPod. We both play games: I play board games with family or solitaire on my computer; he plays RPGs online with Brits, Australians, Icelanders, Europeans, and soldiers in Iraq. He reads news and articles from the computer; I run them off from the computer onto paper and then read them in the car or in the bath. But even he meets up with friends, buys books at Barnes and Noble, goes to the movie theater, etc.

I enjoyed most reading Dr. Wendy Schultz's "To a Temporary Place in Time." I, too, like to belive that "Libraries are not just collections of documents and books, they are conversations, they are convocations of people, ideas, and artifacts in dynamic exchange." I think that libraries--and librarians--have time to adapt. Perhaps there will be more than one kind, or even two kinds, of libraries in the future. There is much said about meeting our constituency where it is at, presumably in cyberspace, and working with its cyberspace tools, but is that not also limiting if we confine ourselves to that? What about all of those constituents who don't care about Facebook or a blog and just want a comfy place to sit, or a librarian who knows how to recommend a good book and can remember their children's names? Or maybe they want all of the above!

So, I am going to try not to limit myself: I will read more about Web 2.0; I will move on to RSS feeds; I will make it through the 23 things by the deadline!! I'll steal the time from lunch hours, from television watching, from Saturday morning sleep-ins. But the second a kid walks through the door and wants help, I'm just so out of here...