Week Six, Assignment #15

#15: Read some perspectives on Web 2.0. Future of Libraries.

I'm reading the "Away from the 'icebergs' " perspective and I agree with Rick Anderson's views on the "just in case" collection. When I do collection building and I see the areas in which my middle school library is deemed lacking, I have the sneaking feeling that no one will ever check out the books that the "collection development experts" want me to buy. I don't need a "just in case" collection when all the information my students want is on the Internet. Collection development made sense when all materials had to be print materials, but that's not how students want to obtain their information these days.

Library 2.0, for me, means using the resources available on the Web to make information accessible to my library patrons. For school libraries, there are limitations imposed by our tech department, based on receiving government funding. It is against our school district rules to be able to access email other than school district email, blogs, instant messaging, wikis -- any means by which students can send or receive personal messages from non-approved personel. As I understand it, this restriction is related to our district receiving government funding. We didn't use to have this restriction -- it's all come about in the last couple of years.

My school library is able to use Web 2.0 blogs that are made within the School Center Web platform, for which our district pays an annual fee. It supposedly helps to keep students from accessing blog topics that would not be age-appropriate. (It doesn't block YouTube, though, and students access all kinds of materials on that, so blocking teacher access to many of the Web 2.0 materials -- like blogger -- really does not make a lot of sense.)