Library 2.0

I am not a librarian. I apologize in advance to all my librarian colleagues and friends but here it is -- the library profession has done a really, really lousy job with the technology of library science up to now and I doubt it will get better with the "advent" of Library 2.0. There is nothing customer-centric about it. "Keyword" searches force --really, "attempt" to force me, but I don't do it -- to search in terms that are your words, not mine, and follow somebody else's thought processes. I can't ever find anything in the catalog. I am forever telling whoever will listen that it isn't apparent to a non-librarian that a keyword search is different from a subject search, both of which are different from a google search. But they just tell me I'm not doing it correctly.

So what? Many library science people SAY they are going to make it a more customer-centric experience but in reality, I expect it will become more and more eccentric, just as the online catalog is more eccentric than the card catalog was.

Decades ago, I spent a short, miserable period of my life as a teacher. I was tutoring a young child in phonics, who had recently immigrated from the West Indies. Her teacher said she was below grade in reading, but that simply wasn't the case.

I showed my young pupil a cartoon drawing of a rug, and asked her to put a circle around the letter representing the initial sound. She circled "M." I asked her why. She said, it was a picture of a "m-m-m-mat." From her point of view, she was absolutely correct. I was not serving her needs, but trying to force her to look at the world through my eyes.

If 2.0 is building on the supposed 'successes' if 1.0, it is going to be very dismal, indeed. You can't be customer-centric if you do it on librarians' terms and not the customers'.