Defining Librarian 2.0

I guess those of us in LibraryLand like our edges straight. We like to know exactly what we're dealing with; have procedures delineated and definitions articulated: but I'm wondering...do spend too much time defining and not enough time doing? Do we still need to be defining librarian 2.0?

In 2008 delegates at the ALIA NLS represent a nervous approach to 2.0.

• a librarian who uses web 2.0 technologies
• overseer of web 2.0 technologies to facilitate library 2.0 collaboration
• social networking in a library environment
• inter-reactive
• using technology?
• social, collaborative environment that engages customers
• a new breed of librarian that represents a state of mind the looks at services users technology and mashes them all up
• library education 2.0? haven't thought about it but I'll have a go ...

If I ask "isn't that what we've always done?" after each of the speakers in this video, I find myself mostly saying "yes". Librarians have always been early adopters - we recognised the need for information to be findable long before search engines, we understood metadata long before other sections of society. Perhaps then these comments can be summarised thus, Librarian 2.0 is a librarian doing what they've always done - creating, informing and collaborating - in a community that now includes the online community.

Laura Cohen's (2006) Librarian's 2.0 Manifesto captures 2.0 librarians.

We have always responded positively to changes in our culture, if we hadn't we'd be extinct already, but Cohen acknowledges that we need to move faster now. In 2006 she said we need to educate ourselves about the information culture of our users and incorporate that knowledge into our library services. This is not a time in history for libraries to move slowly but alarmingly, it seems that two years on from ideas like Cohens the new librarians at the ALIA NLS were still coming to grips with definitions rather than engaging in the process.

The Cohen Manifesto:

• educate, we need new skills
• courage, it's a new world step into it bravely  
• try for excitement not fear
• essential...willingness to let go
• accept mistakes and the 'not quite perfect'
• leverage what's out there, google doesn't have to be the enemy of us
• go to our clients and speak their language
• collaborate, it's not about being gatekeepers anymore
• less of the locked-down more of the open

So let's stop defining it and start doing it we'll work out definitions as we go.

The last word goes to Mal Booth University Librarian at UTS who in 2011 said let's use new technology, to do new things.