I have been so busy lately, surprisingly so, but in a good way.  After doing a 10 minute showcase at VALA, I have done a presentation on Web 2.0 for Innov8 – a vendor organised information seminar. I also have coming in the next few weeks “Beyond blogs and wikis” at the ALIES conference and a lecture to post-grad students at RMIT on what my library is doing with Web 2.0 tools.  On the off chance you are interested in any of these, click on the Presentations tab at the top of my blog and you will find them  embedded there (after they have been presented).

Not that this post is about self-publicising, because its not.  The feedback I had from  Innov8 was that attendees had already heard about a lot of things that I had presented on, but that my presentation helped them understand what they are, in an straightforward manner and in a context (libraries) that they could relate to.

It made me realise that when you are on the cutting edge, things that are old news to you are still very new to most others.  Which leads to the question – how long until everyone (or at the least the majority – in particular our users or potential users) understands this new technology and how can we speed up the process?

I guess I am doing my bit professionally by doing these presentations.  We are doing the same at my library by running Learning 2.0 for staff and offering public seminars on eBay, online image sharing, downloading music etc.  We are also utilising the technology – we have 2 blogs, a Flickr account, are using del.icio.us links, Google maps, web polls, offering RSS feeds and more.  We are getting interest in these initiatives, but take up is relatively slow in relation to home PC internet access, so is it because we are not offering the right things, or because people aren’t aware of or know how to best use these tools?  If its the latter, what can we do to inform them? (if its the former, we’ll do something about that too – our web polls will help us to figure out which it is, if not both)

I guess another question is why would our users want/need to understand these things?  I don’t really have a good answer to this one – just 2 thoughts. I think this is the way of the world now and more and more of our users and potential users will be expecting their local library to be doing it.  And as communities are spending more time online, this is an even more important service that libraries should be providing to best serve our users.

Am I expecting too much? Not everyone is  a techie of one degree or another, but although Web 2.0 is technology based, its more about collaboration and contribution, so I don’t think so.  Technology fear could be hampering, as we found out as a result of my library’s  Learning 2.0 program.  Some staff who had been reluctant of, or not interested in using Web 2.0 tools have taken to them and are using them in library services with great enthusiasm.  A little familiarity in this case breeds improved library service!

In the meantime, I would really appreciate your feedback on these questions.  Your responses might just help to solve some of these challenges for me and my library.  In the meantime, I’ll keep plugging away, in my professional development and in my library service.