Making choices

I've been noticing a trend when reading all of the Project Player blogs in Semester 2. It seems like there is an assumption that the PP instructors expect you to love all of the tools we are sharing in the blog posts simply because we are writing about them.

Well, I'm here to tell you, that's just not the case.

Sure we love a lot of the tools that we're teaching you about, but that doesn't mean we believe they should be received the same by everyone else participating in Project Play. There's no need to apologize if you don't like something or can't see how you would use it in your daily life. C'est la vie!

The point is to be open to exploring things you might think have no application at your library, to be aware of what's out there, and not be afraid to try new things. We all have to make choices about which tools to use, what we have time for, and what we can maintain in the long run.

The other thing I want to ask you all to keep in mind is that the point of a lot of the tools we're sharing is collaboration. Sure, Remember the Milk might not be something you would use personally - paper and pen might be your preference - but if you were working with a group, it might be ideal because it affords the ability to keep one central task list that anyone in the group can edit. I wonder if there just aren't as many people collaborating on projects in our libraries as I would have thought? If there's no opportunity provided to work in this way, I guess I can see why viewing these tools in that light would be difficult.

One last thing... Some of the tools are also about putting library services out where people are online rather than expecting them to come to you (or your library's web site). That's why RSS is so important - your content is automatically delivered to people instead of them having to come and check your site for what's new. It's also why sites like MySpace and Facebook should at least be considered - yes, the pages are usually ugly, but it would put your information out where thousands of people are interacting rather than assuming they'll find your web site if they're online.

I'm hoping that Project Play will help us all adopt a more 2.0 way of thinking. We're used to waiting for people to walk in our doors with some encouragement through traditional means. But that's just not the way the world is anymore. We can't wait. Some people might never walk through our doors, but they might be able to use our services externally and become library supporters because of it. That means we need to be out where they are, so happenstance can bring the library and new users together. Sure all of this has implications on service and the choices we make will become more and more difficult, but that's the way of the world these days, no?