Inter-Thing Observations 2

I've gotten static about my 'attitude' towards the Things. Nobody has actually ordered me to embrace them without reservation, but it's tending that way. This is not going to happen. Some things, like podcasts, wikis, and YouTube have interesting possibilities, as does instant messaging. From what I have seen of the Things to date, some libraries have taken commercial products designed for individuals and cleverly adapted them to library purposes. If it works for them and their patrons, I am all for it.

Now for the reservations. A lot of these Things are .com, which means that a commercial entity is involved. Despite the Google motto of 'don't be evil' which has been adopted by other services, I worry. Google, after all, is complicit in internet censorship in China, possibly elsewhere. All of these .coms collect sign-up data which they supply to their advertisers, even if they don't supply individual information. Do we want our patrons' information collected? Remember how contributions to NPR dropped after it was discovered they were selling mailing lists? Do we want this to happen to libraries? Has anybody explored whether any of this violates library confidentiality statutes? Do we want to find out the hard way when some library is sued out of existence because of .com collaboration?

I have reservations about posting library historical collections on Flickr, and I don't care if LC or Smithsonian are doing it Can you imagine the flap if somebody donated a collection of historical photos including well-loved kin, and that person saw the inane and sometimes unpleasant comments that get posted? Historical photographs donated to a library should be properly cataloged and posted on its website not just posted. Having said that, I do think that it would be a great place to solicit identifications. You'd have to read through a lot of 'weird hat, dude,' profanities, and irrelevancies, but you might find some answers. However, if you already have the ID, for goodness' sake, catalog the pictures, and if you don't have a historical photographs section on your website, get one. And find some secure physical storage for the originals.

Twitter may even have its possibilities, but anybody who read Doonesbury for the first two weeks of March when Roland Hedley III Twittered himself on-camera rather than reporting his story might conclude that it is exclusively the province of the self-involved twit (and yes, I wrote that intentionally). I rarely even have my cell on my person let alone turned on, so a library tweet would never catch me. It might catch those who do twittering, though.

I won't be silly enough to say that any of this is just a passing fad and would never work. I say that an uncritical embrace of anything is a bad idea. After Library 2.0, there's 2.1, ad infinitum. Find the things that work in your community, invest in those, be aware of the rest, and don't let yourself be hustled into anything.

Message to my surrealists: You are the weirdest of the weird, and I am proud of you.