Gunilla, Isto and Outi presented at the panel New Modes of Information Behavior Emerging From the Social Web organised at this year’s ASIS&T Annual Meeting in Vancouver. The panel was cut rather short (from 90 min to 60 min) in a pretty short notice, but it still went quite smoothly. A special thanks also to other two panelists, Helena Francke from the EXAKT project and Hazel Hall from the Edinburgh Napier University.
Isto talked in his presentation about the premises of Information Service 2.0 and referred to an ongoing study on unfound information as a basis for developing future informations services. The takeaway message of the presentation was there is a clear need to focus on a premisory level on that what users can find useful instead of what information service providers have to offer. It is not a question of providing something better or more advanced per se, but rather something different that does not exist or is difficult to find.
Outi reported on her study on professional librarians’ blogs, or biblioblogosphere, in Finland. Professional blogs can function as a channel of communicating very different kinds of information, from various viewpoints and using different strategies of argumentation.
Gunilla presented an ongoing study on scholarly communication and its changes in the era of the social web. She suggested that a traditional cyclical view of scholarly communication is about to change and the social web is affecting multiple stages of the process making it significantly more complex and multifaceted than before.
http://www.btj.fi/?file=694
Kim Holmberg, Isto Huvila, Maria Kronqvist-Berg, Outi Nivakoski ja Gunilla Widén-Wulff
KIRJASTO 2.0: Muuttuvan osallistumisen kulttuuri
ISBN 978-951-692-747-6. Nid. 206 s. Hinta 37 euroa.
Kirjasto 2.0 = kirjat & kamat + ihmiset + radikaali luottamus
Sähköisen sosiaalisen verkoston käyttäjät ovat yhteydessä toisiinsa ja osallistuvat verkkoympäristön muokkaamiseen. Sitä kutsutaan Web 2.0:ksi.
Kirjasto 2.0 hyödyntää sosiaalisen verkon tekniikoita ja verkkopohjaisia työkaluja. Kirjasto 2.0:ssa luodaan ja jaetaan sisältöjä. On sanottu, että Kirjasto 2.0 on taso, jossa kirjastojen käyttäjä määrää miten ja milloin hänellä on pääsy palveluihin, joita hän tarvitsee ja haluaa.
Tämän teoksen kirjoittajat ovat Åbo Akademin Informaatiotutkimuksen oppiaineen Kirjasto 2.0 -tutkimusryhmän jäseniä. Ryhmää johtaa professori Gunilla Widén-Wulff.
Library 2.0 - a New Participatory Context research project participates in ASIS&T Annual Meeting in a panel “New Modes of Information Behavior Emerging From the Social Web“. Panel is chaired by Gunilla and among panelists are also Isto, Outi and Maria. Other presenters are Hazel Hall from Napier University and Helena Francke from the EXAKT project. The panel is sponsored by ASIS&T SIG-USE.
I participated recently the tenth Libraries in the Digital Age (LIDA) conference in Croatia. Even though the conference is not explicitly a library 2.0 conference, the both notions, ‘library 2.0′ and ‘libraries in the digital age’, are essentially related. They are related to libraries and digitality.
As I already wrote elsewhere, library 2.0 was not mentioned in a high number of presentations, but many aspects related to the phenomenon were more or less explicitly mentioned quite frequently.
It has been noted in many occasions that we are the last generations who bother to make a real distinction between the digital age and the pre-digital age as the coming generations don’t have any first-hand experiences of the pre-era. I assume that the same can be safely applied to library 2.0 discussion. When library is library 2.0 there is no sense to make a point of library 2.0. This does not, however, make the issues discusses in the context of library 2.0 any less relevant. What is needed, following the reasoning of Peter Ingwersen, is that we develop approaches and tools to cope with the problems related to the new things (whether they are user created tags or something else). And what is more important, there is the other side of the coin: the opportunities.
Library2pointoh.fi has been updated to use Wordpress MU 2.7.
A new year and new challenges! Among many things the project group is in the process of writing a book, trying to define Library 2.0 into a broader context. Based on the Library 2.0 definition presented in their article What is library 2.0? (Holmberg, Huvila et al. Journal of Documentation, 2009 to appear), the book pictures the seven building blocks that Library 2.0 consists of: interactivity, users, participation, libraries and library services, web and web 2.0, social aspects, and technology and tools.
We think all of these perspectives are important for a Library 2.0 compliant service. At the same time all these perspectives are tightly bound together and overlapping and we have realized that the writing process is really a learning process where the project members must define what they mean by the concepts all the time. The seven building blocks constitute the main chapters of the book and they all sound fairly easy at a first glance – but the problems occur as soon as you start to write. How do you write about library services without going too deeply into users? Or how are you able to keep technology and tools separated from web and web 2.0? Of course you can’t but the main issues behind the perspectives are brought into attention. It is also a challenge to find the balance between the theoretical and practical level of the book. But aren’t problems there in order to be solved? And we hope this kind of book will have a wide target group among library and information specialists, in the education and research, and among everyone interested in the future of the library!
The building blocks of Library 2.0
The 10th ILI conference under the theme Translating 2.0 Technologies for Tangible Benefits & Transparency took place in London on 16 - 17 October. Gunilla Widén-Wulff, Maria Kronqvist-Berg and Outi Nivakoski were there to listen interesting presentations and also to present our own research project.
The conference had a very practical orientation, and it was useful to hear about implementations of Web 2.0 technologies in different kinds of libraries and other organizations. There were also forecasts for the future, for example in the inspiring panel discussion What Constitutes a Next Generation Library by Michael Stephens, Michael Casey and Thomas Brevik, in which also the audience engaged lively.
The atmosphere in the conference was truly international, since the participants came from all over the globe. Also the presentations discussed application of Web 2.0 tools in various countries. All in all, it can be said that we experienced the global Library 2.0 phenomenon in a nutshell!
NORSLIS (Nordic Research School in Library and Information Science) gave a course on Public libraries and the Nordic welfare state - the changing role of public libraries in Uppsala September 29 - October 3. Maria Kronqvist-Berg and Outi Nivakoski participated in this course and presented their subprojects. Outi is studying opinions and trends in library blogspace and Maria is studying the context and stakeholders of public library 2.0.
The course was very well-organized and the lectures gave insight into the research on public libraries role concerning both historical and contemporary perspectives. There were lectures on, for example, the public library as a meeting place, social capital and public libraries and how to use discourse analysis in public library research. The senior researchers who gave the lectures were Michael Buckland, Ilkka Mäkinen, Kerstin Rydbeck, Ragnar Audunson, Frank Huysmans, Andreas Vårheim, Laura Skouvig och Svanhild Aabø.
Some of the preliminary findings and ponderings of the project were discussed during the Creating Knowledge V conference in Åbo 20th - 22nd August 2008.
Isto Huvila gave a presentation on Information service 2.0 (slides) and Kim Holmberg on Facebook and libraries.
