This morning, I decided that I want to see a "Library 2.0" conference in Ohio. I want national speakers (from St Joseph County, from Anne Arbor, from Seattle Public, from Salt Lake City Public) to talk about the transformation of their buildings and services to meet their patrons where they are. I want gaming demonstrations. I want OCLC to come and talk about their findings regarding user perceptions and the library brand. I want an art/design company to create avatars for librarians to use on their blogs, their IM clients, their Skype accounts. I want someone to talk about Wiki subject guides, library Flickr accounts, and RSS feeds from the catalog. I want a panel of ILS vendors to talk about what they're doing regarding graphical navigation systems, user alerting, and the dis-aggregation of their products (I want to hear them say that their products offer better resource discovery than Amazon.com, and have an audience "boo" them).

And while I started hammering the IT button pretty hard at the end of that last paragraph, it's not about technology. It's about vision, services, and tools. It's about building the willingness of Ohio's libraries to imagine what they can do next.

I'm impatient. October 2007, the date of the next statewide OLC conference, seems too far away to make this happen. But knowing how the OLC planning cycle begins rolling as a tiny snowball, already with unstoppable momentum by the time I notice it's happening, I thought I'd put my plugs in early. "Library 2.0" is a conversation that is happening among the visionaries now, and I think it's a conversation that Ohio libraries should want to be a part of...even if it takes us 22 months to get there.

# posted by yarmando @ 1:53 PM