Thing 2: Library 2.0

That's a lot of reading, a lot of fancy talk about conceptualizing, re-imagining, collaborating and innovating. I like libraries the way they are, but I also like other things, such as discount malls and public parks. This re-imagined library is something different, which doesn't make it a bad thing. I might like it. Two examples that illustrate my thinking come to mind: one good, one not so good. I'll start with the not so good.

Public Baths
I'm old enough to remember visiting my grandmother in the 1950s and using the local public baths to clean up. In her poor, working class neighborhood (in Hull, England), homes were built without bathrooms. Once a week, you went to the public baths and paid sixpence to wallow in a large tub filled with as much hot water as you could handle. Those neighborhoods are now gone, bulldozed, along with the public baths. Remove a need, and the public institution that serves the need will disappear also. When everything that the public wants to read, watch and listen to is available online, how much longer will public libraries be needed? What is the remaining need that must continue to be served?

The Aberystwyth Community
Now for the good. Every weekend I visit Aberystwyth online. It's a seaside community in Wales. The University of Wales and the National Library of Wales perch on the hills overlooking the town. I lived there until 1963 (just before I turned 12), and revisited many weekends during my late teens and early '20s. It's where my heart is. My family knows that I want my ashes sprinkled on the north beach when I die. I can't get there nowadays, but I've learned that there are many others who lived there and long to go back, including many graduated students. We meet at a website, look at the webcams, www.bbc.co.uk/wales/mid/sites/aberystwyth/pages/webcam.shtml (it's raining today), and get all melancholy. The site has many features and invites visitors to share their photographs and memories, participate in little quizes, etc. It's great, a little treat I give myself on Sundays.

So, how do we ensure that we don't end up like the public baths? If Library 2.0 can make the library's web site as valuable, rich, and emotionally rewarding to me as the Aberystwyth site, we'll be fine. Meanwhile, let's not forget that reading is an essentially passive activity, and the act of creating within one's mind a setting and characters, and holding them, remembering them, having them fight, love, live and die within the mind is not so much different and no less creative and valuable than most of the activities going on at the library's computers day after day.

So, this is a bit frustrating. The instructions end with "You're ready to start posting" but I haven't been told how to post. I'm guessing that this is the way, but unsure. That's always a bit unsettling. It reminds me of school math classes where the teachers would tell us how to do one thing then test us on something slightly different, presumably to test our ability to 'figure it out.' Why make things difficult when you can make them easy, I always thought. Apart from that, the process seemed not too difficult.