MANAGING TECHNOLOGY ! The Library Catalog in a 2.0 World by Karen Coyle I n my previous column I presented some past views of the future of the library and the library catalog. Writing on the threshold of the computer revolution, most of those futurists correctly foresaw a library and catalog that could be accessed from the user’s office or home. Some even predicted the eventual dissolution of the physical library, with all documents and all services being digital. But none of them envisioned the rise of a vibrant information environment entirely outside of libraries: the World Wide Web. Our users have shifted their attention from the library to other sources of information. The question today is not how do we get users into the library, but how can we take the library to the users. The answer will necessarily involve a transformation of the library catalog. In the era of the library with walls, the library user’s accessible information universe was bounded by those walls, and the catalog was the user’s entry into that accessible realm. Today’s library without walls provides access over computer networks to a wide variety of resources, most of which are not represented in the library catalog. There are journal articles, full text reference books, institutional repositories, digitized archives, and curriculum materials. The materials that are available through the library are generally not part of the open access information sources that the user encounters through Web search engines. Yet those open access resources are also a valuable part of the user’s information environment, and should not be seen, either by librarians or users, as rivals to library resources. The challenge today is to present all of this as a coherent whole, and still help users make choices between the different offerings. THE DISCUSSION ‘‘... we have a catalogue interface which is unconnected to popular user discovery environments or workflows.’’ 1 In the library press and the professional blog-o-sphere there are ongoing discussions of the future of the catalog, of cataloging, and of the library itself. In fact, we can’t discuss these three topics separately; as the library changes, the catalog must change; and as the catalog changes then cataloging must change to fulfill its needs. The discussion about changing the catalog 2,3 tends to focus on the creation of new user services, sometimes layered on top of the current library system and catalog data, sometimes in terms of a new model for the library’s service to the user. There is also discussion about changing cataloging, in particular the work of the Joint Steering Committee for the Revision of AACR and its work on Resource Description and Access, 4 the presumed successor to the AACR2 cataloging rules. The broader question of changing the library does come up, and often in the context of adjusting to new models of scholarly communication. 5,6 2.0 In a world that is constantly and rapidly changing, the declaration that we are approaching something called ‘‘Web two-point-oh’’ is a strong statement that this change will be substantial. Not that there will be an actual moment in which the Web 1.9 will become Web 2.0, because this isn’t a planned or even a coordinated change. The term ‘‘2.0’’ is just a shorthand for an unknown but desired move to something new. The change is evolutionary and relatively gradual in a world where it is almost a full_time job to keep abreast of new daily developments. There is no single definition of Web 2.0, although certain experts can describe its characteristics. Tim O’Reilly, founder of the foremost publishing house for computer and networking titles, gave these as some of the key elements of a Web 2.0 application: it takes place on the Web; it is a service, not a product; it is not limited to a single software product or a single machine; it Is open and shared; users in group and social interaction are part of its organization. Users provide content and add value. 7 Because ‘‘2.0’’ has become the word for ‘‘modern’’, librarians are talking about ‘‘Library 2.0’’. There is no agreement on what 2.0 means in the library environment, 8 and given that libraries have existed for centuries compared to the less than two decades of the web, it’s quite possible that we should be talking about Library 7.0 or 12.0. There is one sense, however, in which the use of 2.0 makes sense, and that is that at this moment in time the library’s services are very much interdependent with the World Wide Web, and the libraries’ users are, almost by definition, Web users. There are two topics in the Library 2.0 discussion that I find most compelling. The first is that the library catalog, in the sense of the finding list of the library’s holdings, is no longer the library’s primary user service. The second is that the 2.0 philosophy emphasizes the social aspects of information such as reviews, recommendations, and tagging. Karen Coyle, Digital Library Consultant, http://www.kcoyle.net bkcoyle@kcoyle.netN. The Journal of Academic Librarianship, Volume 33, Number 2, pages 289–291 March 2007 289