Meredith Farkas wrote an interesting post about the failure of some 2.0 technologies in libraries. She had a lot of good reasons but I think the most important reason is lack of strategic planning.
She states, "Some libraries jumped on the blogging bandwagon because they thought (or were told) that every library must have a blog. Other libraries started wikis because staff were really excited about the idea of having a wiki. Neither are good reasons to implement a technology. We first need to understand the needs of our population (be it patrons or staff) and then implement whatever technology and/or service will best meet those needs. We need to have clear goals in mind from the outset so that we can later assess if it’s successful or not. These technologies may be fun, but they’re simply tools. We don’t walk around with hammers looking for nails to smash in."
Exactly. I have been saying these things for quite some time. Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should. There are a ton of blog and wiki corpses littering the Internet these days and libraries have their fair percentage of them. Knowing about these tools AND when we need to apply them is the important message that gets lost sometimes. However, we can only do that if we keep our eyes and ears open. Running out and starting a blog just because everybody has to have a blog is about as helpful and effective as burying your head in the sand regarding technology. Neither extreme is good and libraries suffer as a result.
If you run out and adopt every new technology without a plan or some clear parameters, you increase the likelihood that your new endeavor might never take off or worse just hang in limbo like all of those out of date blogs, wikis, and delicious pages. How is that helpful to your user population? More importantly what else could you have been doing with that time and effort that would have been better for your patrons.
If you bury your head in the sand you run the same risks of not effectively helping or addressing the needs of your patrons. How many people would like to have a search feed sent to them or the table of contents? Without knowing about RSS and its possibilities you are limiting your patron and your options.

I think sometimes we would be better off if we just stripped the term 2.0 off of technology. We evaluate and plan other technologies, services, and upgrades in our libraries. Sometimes we plan them to death (but that is another topic). But when you throw in the term 2.0 it seems that sometimes we forget ourselves and jump to extremes. We either run out and adopt it automatically without question, or we bury our heads in the sand thinking "not another 2.0 thing."

Forget buzzwords and 2.0 terms. We need to know about the tools but we also need to remember to let the need choose the tool, not the tool choose the need.

Labels: Technology