I'm not at all sure, to be honest, how to get younger people to look to libraries as just as a (perceived?) valid a source of information as Wikipedia. The youth are all about viral and community - and not just the youth either to be real honest. One thing to look at is the number of older people not only joining sites like Facebook, but becoming addicted to games like Farmville and Cityville. Community shared knowledge develops the feel of "real" knowledge, and often it can be, whereas library catalogs with their MARC21 standards and Library of Congress records and Dewey Decimal numbers and the like are structured and moderated. This may seem cold and inaccessible to current times.
The reality is that all this information must be cataloged and standardized to make it easily located. What many of these users don't know is similar categorizing standards with keywords and metatags exist on all this information that seems so loose and free flowing on the surface. That's how a search engine or wiki can be optimized to quickly find the information wanted. I wonder if part of the issue is that with a library it's more transparent and thereby more threatening.
None of that solves the idea of how to make it more accessible, it's more trying to analyze "root cause" I suppose. However that's where my brain's at this moment.
Shannon,
ReplyDeleteVery good point about the feel of community. The library is well situated to adopt Web 2.0 to engage the community and interact more with the community. The library can tap into what is working. For instance, some libraries let people contribute their own tags for the books so the catalog appears to be more user friendly. For example, LibraryThing for Libraries.