You 2.0
It’s not just the Web that’s transforming
By Brian Kenney, Editor-in-Chief -- School Library Journal, 1/1/2007
Our staff had a feisty debate over this month’s cover—and not just whether the librarian avatar is too, well, voluptuous. Is Teen Second Life really all that important, we wondered?
Maybe yes, maybe no. While the 3-D world could become an even more powerful online phenomenon, attracting teens in huge numbers from across the globe, it could also be quickly superseded by something far more compelling, ending up as a footnote to the Web’s relentless evolution. Your guess is as good as mine.
But Teen Second Life—as interesting as it might be—is only the latest installment in what is an ongoing story. The bigger story is what Time magazine, in naming “You” its Person of the Year, calls “community and collaboration on a scale never seen before.”
“The new Web is a very different thing,” writes Lev Grossman in Time. “It’s a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter. Silicon Valley consultants call it Web 2.0, as if it were a new version of some old software. But it’s really a revolution.”
It is a revolution, and one that challenges librarians more than nearly any other profession (except maybe magazine editors, and we’ll get to them). It’s a revolution that we’ve been documenting in our pages and podcasts, calling it “School Library 2.0” to underscore the connection between this social and informational shift and the school library program.
You know the drill. Blogs and wikis, of course. Flickr and YouTube (see “YouTube Comes to the Classroom,” p. 22). RSS feeds. Social bookmarking (see “All Together Now,” p. 33). LibraryThing. MySpace and Facebook. Blogger and del.icio.us. and Digg and Technorati. Plus much more, including some tools that, no doubt, will have come to prominence soon after this editorial is written.
Why is this revolution a challenge to librarians? Because today, it’s through these tools that information is published, shared, and evaluated. This is where information seeking takes place. It’s on the Web, in the interaction between “established” media and “user-created” media, that our culture’s conversations are taking place.
For librarian-teachers, this challenge is even more critical. The new Web is increasingly the pen and paper for young people. It’s one of the places they experience and create narrative. It’s where reading and learning takes place, where recreational needs are met, communities are formed, and knowledge is constructed.
For editors, the challenge is to create content that’s timely and authoritative—and invite the comments and expertise of readers. As editors of a professional publication—where our readers have so much knowledge to share—this challenge is especially acute. If we publish a feature on using graphic novels with young readers, shouldn’t you be able to share your experiences, your recommended titles? In the next few months, we’ll launch a new version of SLJ.com that will make it possible for you to be a participant as much as a reader.
Back when many of us signed up for this librarian gig, we were told that “keeping up” was a vital part of the job. That meant reading publications like SLJ, knowing what was being published in your field, tracking database content, while keeping abreast of your users’ world, whether that was elementary education or pharmacology.
Now it’s all changed. We still need to read our professional publications (in some format or other) and keep current with our users’ lives. But we also need to be active participants in the new Web, with its opportunities for community and collaboration. Today, keeping up can mean something very different, like learning how to fly in Teen Second Life, so you can get to your next author’s visit on time.
Welcome to librarianship in 2007.
