Magically Del.icio.us and the Technocrati Library 2.0

The best thing about this entire weeks exercise from my point of view was the discovery of Del.icio.us and the ...in Plain English series of webcasts on youtube.

Delicious lets me keep track of all the websites and especially blog and webcomics that I mean to read regularly, but never seem to remember to. I created my own delicious page (linked earlier) after adding a few links to the PBCLS Delicious site. (I can't believe no one had added Unshelved yet!)

I looked through Technocrati, and the idea seems to be that it is a highly specialized search engine that indexes blogs and social media and is driven through tag searching rather than more traditional keyword searches. It'll be a good tool to have at my disposal if I ever need to search blogs, but as a library student I'm a bit of a stickler for good sourcing and finding out what Joe Schmoe thinks about something seems of limited usefulness to me. I guess if I wanted to keep up on the buzz surrouding an event and get the unvarnished "man on the street" opinion it would be a good source for it.

The idea of Library 2.0 seems great, but I'm not sure whether our system is ready for it. We're doing the 23 things and we've got a new webmaster that seems to be making some strides (kudos on the incremental improvements of the homepage, though I would have probably taken it to formula and started fresh), but what I hear again and again from my peers is that at every level innovation is looked upon skeptically. From minor changes in shelving materials in the workroom to major rethinking of library policies, my friends in the system only seem to hear one word. "No." I think because the collaborative everyone's-ideas-matter nature of Library 2.0 is so counter to the way our system is run some retraining is going to be needed. We'll get to Library 2.0 eventually, we just need to get some Librarians 2.0 first.