Benefits Of Web 2. 0 Technologies In Libraries

I was also directed from Google.co.uk to a number of personal and private blogs and forums that satisfied my search criteria. All these Web 2.0 tools greatly assisted me in completing my task and equipping me with the knowledge to do these again in future. “Web 2.0” is a term coined by Tim O’Reilly in 1999 to describe non – written script web pages. They allow me to improve my knowledge base and develop working understanding of IT systems through the use of Blogs, podcasts and Videos.

The birth of the internet created a revolution on technology, and social media in the world. It created a vast amount of change, and has put humans onto a path that they thought they could not walk on. It has shifted modern culture and helped shape it into a unique one where the internet seems to run the world. One big part of internet culture is the platform Web 2.0. It has helped shape many applications and has had an impact on creation, and content presented in the web to viewers. Web 2.0 can be shown in the popular app Twitter, and it shows how the site has evolved, what concepts are involved in it, and the future of Twitter and Web 2.0.

“Technology” by H. Stephen Wright is a scholarly article detailing the inefficiencies of technology dealing with cataloging in libraries. In this article, Wright’s main argument surrounds the difficulty of predicting future technological breakthroughs, specifically in libraries and the music industry. He continually criticizes and undermines the power that modern technology possesses. He goes on to find fault in the durability of technology because libraries have to constantly update its collection. Granted that this article was written more than a decade ago, Wright’s criticism still presents a limited understanding of the possibilities of technological advancements.

The physical entity of the library is the prevailing advantage that allows books to remain relevant even though the technological convergence has occurred. While individuals have greater access to information than in the past, people, for the most part, will congregate at a place where others gathered. For this reason, the look and feel of libraries will change as technology advances.

The Library will collect materials in a variety of formats divided into three main types: print (hardcover books, paperback books, large-print books, graphic novels, newspapers, magazines, etc.), non-print (CDs, DVDs, and miscellaneous objects in the Library of Things), and electronic resources (online databases,

Library users today are able to meet most their information needs through the sources outside the library. The ubiquitous access to internet today and the rise of the companies like Google, Amazon and Wikipedia have provided viable alternatives to users for their information needs. So libraries are experiencing an evolutionary change in their traditional services. And the rapid evolving digital technologies can be seen as an opportunity for libraries as their need to evolve in the face of these new challenges.

Libraries have been transitioning to the digitalization of literature for preservation and distribution purposes. When a group of libraries gave works to HathiTrust for digital conversion, tension from the owners of the work began to rise. The Authors Guild, an organization that has been supporting writers and their rights since 1912, filed a case against HathiTrust to protect intellectual property. Google formed HathiTrust, an organization that the libraries loaned books to for the purpose of digital scanning and creating metadata files (Ford, 2011).

In the 21st century, collections and services will need to meet customer's needs in a much more personalized and customized way. Collections will need to become more diverse, in terms of format, language, and access. Librarians will need to have knowledge of new formats for library materials, and plan to use their funds in purchasing materials that will meet and promote various skills. Customers will want library materials that use their critical thinking and problem solving skills, promote creativity and innovation, allow for communication and collaboration, and teach information, media and technology skills. Library materials, that are accessible 24/7, in a range of cutting edge formats, that promote and support learning and using new skill sets, will be the norm. Library services, like library materials, will need to be accessible 24/7 in a 21st Century library. Librarians will need to think about services as customer-centered and focused. Reference services in the 21st century will not be based on the librarian's knowledge and access to information, but the customer's starting point. 21st century customers are coming to librarians, not for answers to questions, but for new access points, or new skill sets. Children's and Teen services will need to incorporate skills for the 21st Century, including critical thinking, innovation, collaboration, information and technological literacy. The expectation will be that library

To survive in the digital age and stay relevant, public libraries have adapted to the new trends of how we read, work and socialize, and have become even more prevalent in these changing times.

He states that there isn’t a single library that has everything in their collection and it is possible for libraries to share between one another. In digital libraries, the collaboration between libraries is different. They assign key words using controlled vocabulary, classification schemes, and other to describe the content. However, this does yield as a problem. Sometimes keywords don’t match between libraries, or a word that a user would consider for the content not match the keyword the librarian had given it. Zaveri suggests the idea of collaborative tagging as a solution to the loss of connection between users and digital libraries. Zaveri then discusses reasons for digital library collaboration from lack of funds, specialization, to data preservation, and role of the country in the world, as digital libraries don’t have a boundary like physical libraries. Because of this importance, Zaveri states it’s necessary to have the users also assign keywords and tags through collaborative tagging. Zaveri continues with discussing the benefits of collaborative tagging, the main one being that what the user tags, the organization of information is shared with other users and they are able to look for that object with that tag. There are then several example of social media sites that use collaborative tagging discussed: Flickr, Delicious, and LibraryThing. Zaveri then compares LibraryThing’s tagging to the LSCH subject headings, which shows that certain terms are used differently between the pair mainly the vocabulary used to identify. Zaveri ends his article with the advantages and disadvantages of collaborative tagging, stating that libraries should include folksonomies to be made more interactive with the users that are in the digital

The purpose of this study is to explore how public libraries could use information technology to ensure they remain a vital member of the community they serve while considering a limited budget. This includes examining how social media and open source software could be used to improve customer access to library resources as well as alternative methods for presenting library programming.

Librarians have duties to design, query, and evaluate information retrieval systems. In order to do so, librarians must understand each basic element of an Information Retrieval System. The first step is to understand their purpose. Information Retrieval Systems are designed to deal with various sources of information, and to satisfy user’s requirements. When a user makes an inquiry, the system must analyze the available sources, match the search specifications, and retrieve the items which are the most relevant to the search terms. Chowdhury (2004) describes the three aspects of Information Retrieval System design: the document subsystem, the user subsystem, and the searching/retrieval subsystem. Together, these three subsystems work to store, maintain, and sort information items. These systems are in place in many areas of libraries. They can be found in privately held databases, Open Public Access Catalogs (OPAC), and paid subscription databases. OPACs may be confined to a single library or they may be jointly managed by a wider library district or by a collaboration of medical or academic libraries. They hold a great deal of information about the physical and the digital library collection. They allow users to retrieve information concerning the location of where information items are to be found. Without a well functioning OPAC, it would be very difficult for both librarians and patrons to access the information items held in library collections. OPACs hold

As our class learned from the last assignment in which we created a writing technology, the introduction of new technology can change the way that people operate on a day-to-day basis. Inventions like the automobile and the television, for example, have forever changed the culture in many countries. However, no invention has changed the world more than the computer. In fact it has been the computer that has made the most recent technological phenomenon, the Internet, possible. While the Internet has made obvious changes in the way people communicate, it has also changed how we perform other functions that are as fundamental to us as reading and writing.

– While orthodox ways of using a library (Reading a book at the library) will be available, introducing new technology to develop a scalable library service would attract the young population and users living at distant locations.

The discovery of the Internet has completely transfigured man’s lifestyle by cutting distance and making the world a small and reachable place to live in. Information is made available with just a click of a button.