After reading the commentarys about web 2.0 at http://www.oclc.org/nextspace/002/1.htm I have one over arching comment: What about the computer illiterate? All these ideas about moving all our resources on to the web and updating our libraries misses one key feature, we still have many people in this society who are grossly computer illiterate. While the number will fall as the number of people who grew up around computers grows, even in my limited experience as a public librarian I still encounter many people everyday who lack even basic computer skills. I love many of the ideas that library 2.0 suggests to us in this profession, but we cannot afford to leave high percentages of our patronage that are either completely computer illiterate, or are at least computer shy, behind. The point of libraries has always been to democratize information and offer priceless information to everyone. Be they digitally challenged or financially challenged, a library should be the place where you can what ever kind of information you want or need.
On a lighter note one specific thing that struck me "quite a change from monolithic...long development times and software release cycles web 2.0..." I hope everyone gets that...that web 2.0, that name is based on the idea that it is the second cycle or software release of the web. And it's funny how the author of this comment was referring directly to the software cycles that gave it it's name.
And I LOVE the NCSU library's catalog http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/!
The flexibility that the catalog hat is the best way to search.
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