week 1

After perusing a number of the articles it is quite clear that Web 2.0 even if the term itself is rather innocuous is very much at the center of current technology zeitgeist, it is hard to read the news without some content about social software or some content being created through the use of social software. I was asked a number of times at both legal libraries I co-oped with how I thought social software might be used in the library. I suggested that for the type of library we were... ie mostly closed stack legal libraries that the benefits were rather small. If anything it would be handy to set up a wiki to avoid using the webcontent people in terms of publishing new information on the intranet. Beyond that issues as raised in the Blyberg article surrounding authority were too big an issue to overcome. Tim O’Reilly in his writings suggests that radically trusting users is the ideal, as my interests lie in Government libraries I very much do not think this is the ideal. Granted I don’t think he was talking about that kind of application when writing, he was talking more about social software in a general sense in this case, particularly open sources software. I think in terms of government libraries that the necessity for authoritative content overrides the benefits of groupthink/content. Granted I’m only talking about one aspect of social software, and a lot of other applications may be relevant. Grant