Librarians are now software innovators?

When the buzz about Web 2.0 took off last year, the common theme was "we can start innovating again." The key words were "we" and "again." We in this context means American, male, Boomer and Gen X, technology geeks. We did it before with Web 1.0, and now we were going to do it again with Web 2.0 tools and techniques that made innovation much cheaper and faster. The unintended consequence of Web 2.0 is that "we" are not the only ones doing the innovation. In my last two posts, I pointed out that innovation was also being done by Gen W and by people outside of the U.S. Another unexpected source of Web innovation is librarians. Don't get me wrong, I like librarians. I worked in libraries from Junior High School straight through college. It is just that next to accountants, librarians are the last group of people I would expect to jump into new technologies. Actually, accountants adopted VisiCalc first, ushering in the era of microcomputers in business, but they were acting as early users, not developers of new software.

Some of the most interesting blogs I now read are by librarians, such as John Tropea's Library clips, Steven Cohen's Library Stuff, and Lorcan Dempsey's weblog. It was Steven's writing about the UPenn library adopting tags that triggered this post. What's so strange about including tags in a library catalog; they are another form of hierarchy right? No, tags are the opposite of a hierarchy. They are a user generated form of anarchy. Every user may have a different tag for the same idea, and may even spell or pluralize it differently. It's the virtual equivalent of letting users pull the books off the shelves and throw them in big piles. After all those years reshelving books, just thinking about it gives me stomach cramps. Librarians adopting tagging is like capitalists adopting Open Source. Even more amazing is the comment on Steven's post pointing out that the UPenn library has a wiki. A wiki in a library? Why not just let the users strip naked and run screaming through the stacks?

Another link in Steven's post points to Library Thing, an amazing experiment in tagging for books spanning dozens of libraries. It even has a book tag cloud. Okay, so this is still really geeky, but these aren't software geeks who are pushing the envelope. I now realize that I can find cool software ideas by searching for blogs and websites with the word library in the URL. In fact, the blog of the Association of College and Research Libraries (Wouldn't you like to attend their conferences? I'm only kidding guys, I'm sure you have great parties.) just had an excellent post on Library 2.0