Okay, Thing 1 and Thing 2 bring to mind a catchy musical (involving calculatus eliminatus), but that's not what this is about. Thing 2 in
this context is about "Web 2.0," which doesn't involve calculatus eliminatus at all. And frankly, it includes a bunch of hype that kinda kills my interest in it. But for me the point of libraries paying attention to Web 2.0 stuff is relevance and patron expectations. My experience with online bookstores is framed by amazon.com. I imagine many (most?) library patrons are online consumers of information and products, and while it might be quaint to have the local library's website be a stripped down, no-frills experience, people's expectations are generally going to be much higher than that. They'll mostly notice what's missing, not what's going well. And if we're not aware of what's out there, we can't decide whether it's relevant to our patrons or not.
Hurm, that sounded like a bunch of hooey, though, so I'm going to leave that alone for now, and turn to something web/library 2.0 that looks relevant and cool:
Check out
Darien Library's website. They've built it on the open-source
CMS Drupal and it has some pretty cool functionality (besides just having a nice clean look). I can see why you might not want to include tagging and reviews on your PAC, but it sure seems like an interesting idea.
Here's a blog post with more links related to Darien's website.
(Drupal, by the way, is coming soon to Lint)
