New users – new libraries – new librarians

Meeting new user expectations at ELAG 2010 In the near future libraries and librarians will be very different from what they are now. That’s the overall impression I took away from the ELAG 2010 conference in Helsinki, June 8-11, 2010.  ELAG stands for “European Library Automation Group”, which is an indication of its age (34 years): “automation” was then what is now “ICT”. The meetings are characterised by a combination of plenary presentations and parallel […]

ReTweet @Reply – Twitter communities

  In my post “Tweeting Libraries” among other things I described my Personal Twitter experience as opposed to Institutional Twitter use. Since then I have discovered some new developments in my own Twitter behaviour and some trends in Twitter at large: individual versus social. There have been some discussions on the web about the pros and cons and the benefits and dangers of social networking tools like Twitter, focusing on “noise” (uninteresting trivial announcements) versus […]

Tweeting libraries

Should libraries use Twitter ? Some web2.0 librarians think so, other people say it’s just a childish hype. Alice de Jong of the Peace Palace Library in The Hague wrote an article recently in the Dutch magazine Informatieprofessional (in Dutch), saying libraries should use Twitter as a means of quick and direct communication with their patrons. The Peace Palace Library uses Twitter as an automatic newsfeed . An interesting question is: how can an in […]

Collection 2.0

Henk Ellerman of Groningen University Library writes about the “Collection in the digital age” reacting to Mary Frances Casserly’s article “Developing a Concept of Collection for the Digital Age“. I haven’t read this 2002 article yet, but Henk Ellerman goes into the problem of finding a metaphor describing collections that for a large part consists of resources available on the internet. Henk says: “…the collection (the one deemed relevant for… well whatever) is a subset […]

Social networking high and low of the year

Last month the Dutch Advisory Committee on Library Innovation published its report “Innovation with Effect“. The report was commissioned by the Dutch Minister of Education, Culture and Science, the charge was to draw up a plan for library innovation for the period 2009-2012 including a number of required conditions. Priorities that had to be addressed were: provision of digital services, collection policy, marketing, HRM. The recommendations of the committee are classified in three main areas […]

Open Stack 2.0

Last week my colleague Bert Zeeman published a poll “Open stack, get rid of it!” (in Dutch) with 3 options: 1. Yes, of course, should have been done long ago 2. Help, no, open stacks are the backbone of the scientific library 3. Nonsense, like always the truth lies in the middle. I voted for option 3, which is a bit spineless at first sight, I admit, but in my defense I can say, that […]

Antisocial Networking

In his post “Twitter me this” Owen Stephens writes about differences in use and audience of Social Networking Sites. (Apparently at Imperial College London they had a similar kind of Web2.0 Learning programme as we had at the Library of the University of Amsterdam.) Owen distinguishes audiences on several, intermixed levels (my interpretation): “young” (e.g. MySpace ) vs. “old(er)” (e.g. Facebook ); “business/networking” (e.g. LinkedIn ) vs. “family and friends” (also FaceBook); “professional” (e.g. Ning […]