Anyone who knows me well knows that I’m a big fan of Meredith Farkas. I really like her work with wikis and her general commentary on libraries and emerging technology. For a while, I felt like I referenced her work far too often — but I really do admire Meredith, and hers was the first library blog that I really got hooked on.
Anyway, Meredith has written a post about library associations and their use of (or resistance to) emerging technology. She mentions Jessamyn West’s offer to convert the Vermont Library Association’s newsletter into HTML so that it would be more easily readable online:
The response to my post and Jessamyn’s was that the person who is involved in creating the newsletter is busy and that she alone will not be able to make everyone happy. I get that and would never ask anything of this person. But the whole point was that Jessamyn was offering to donate her time to put the newsletter into a more online-readable format, so that the newsletter person would not need to do it. We were also told that we should propose to create a technology committee to investigate options, costs, alternatives, and then develop a plan. I understand that this is how things are done, but my gosh, all this for something so minor? All we were talking about was publishing the contents of the newsletter to a blog or a static HTML page. This isn’t some huge endeavor that requires months and months of planning; it’s something Jessamyn could probably accomplish in a day or so.
I understand the frustration that Meredith and Jessamyn are experiencing. Considering the great opportunities for innovation and participation offered to libraries (and, by association, their staff and their customers) by new technology, I’m sad to see progressive ideas stifled by the perceived need to form committees or teams. If it’s free and it’s helpful, what’s the point of this formality?
I work with some people who doubt the relevance of Library 2.0 — and I do believe that some Library 2.0 advocates cross a thin line between innovation and technolust (although I normally side with the 2.0 advocates, simply because I’m a fan of progressive ideas).
But the suggestions put forth by Meredith and Jessamyn are, simply put, good ideas — anything to make information more accessible can’t be bad. This is the upside of the 2.0 movement — the opportunity to move ahead with ideas to make our libraries (and our professional organizations) more attractive, more accessible, more user-friendly.
What librarian could say no to that?
