Thing 2

I just viewed Stephen Abram's video, and here's what I think: I like and totally agree with what he says about learning through experience. I feel like I'm in a split generation, younger than those for whom creating a Facebook page is laughable, but older than those for whom it's an unquestioned necessity. If I hadn't started working in a library last year, I wouldn't even be as familiar as I am now with the existence of various online tools. But knowing they exist is a long way from using them, and that's why as I've begun to hear about Library 2.0 tools, it has felt like hearing about the lifestyle of people in a foreign country--interesting, but far removed from my everyday. So digging in and using the tools is like getting to know another culture. 

I'll take the "culture" metaphor a little further--for me to think about how to apply these tools to libraries is a little like starting a new career in a foreign country, because it's still a new thing for me to think about library services from the perspective of the provider rather than the user. I hear the alarm among (some) librarians about how changing technology threatens the relevance of libraries, but my idea of the mission of libraries is still fuzzy. One of the posts we read says that we need to figure out how to "make the library a destination, not an afterthought." As a user, libraries were an afterthought to me--a very pleasant afterthought, and one I was grateful for--but they were never the destination.  So as I continue to work through these Things, I hope that my own sense of the library's mission will become clearer as well.