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The Annoyed Librarian (aka AL) is a wicked funny blog covering the amazing array of collegiate activities, special emphasis on library inanities. Her recent post, A Librarian’s Anti-2.0 Manifesto, is especially caustic…and entertaining.

Her complaint (rant?) centers around an article in American Librarian, the other AL, entitled Librarian’s 2.0 Manifesto. Can’t link to the actual article as it’s subscription but here’s a link to a sort of shmaltzy burning man type vid that outlines the tenets of Library 2.0 manifesto.

Library 2.0. I guess it’s okay that now everyone has a 2.0 perspective, and fitting in a way. After all, the whole web based, social media shift is impacting all groups in different ways and those different ways need to be talked about (AL calls it Twopointopia). But I digress….

I think Annoyed Librarian has some interesting points in her post. To whit:

“I will avoid requiring users to see things in librarians’ terms but rather will shape services to reflect users’ preferences and expectations.”

That makes a lot of sense in an academic library. Let’s take a bunch of students who don’t know anything and cater to their ignorant expectations. Why don’t we just abandon the library all together? Why not just toss the books into a big pile in the basement since no one will read them anyway. And while you’re at it, link all the databases on the library website randomly, because we know they just want to google them instead of relying on the mean old librarians to categorize anything.

Even though AL makes large assumptions in a single bound, she hits on an important issue here and that is: the librarian holds an important piece of the web 2.0 puzzle. Enterprise applications at this point run the risk of what is essentially a big pile of books in the basement, without the help and facilitation of some fairly standard library practices. On the other hand, we have all experienced (and are still suffering) the problems of overly rigid information management processes. The end user is simply not part of the equation, and like it or not, that’s what the manifesto is getting at. If only it were better at gettting at it.

Here’s another:

“I will lobby for an open catalog that provides personalized, interactive features that users expect in online information environments.”

I’d settle for a catalog that actually had an excellent catalog record for everything the library owned in it.

Knowingly or not, AL strikes on a particularly difficult problem that is not likely to be solved soon: building atop the ruins of a previous system. It’s very tempting to just burn down the previous KM and start anew with some whiz-bang new Enterprise 2.0 applications, but the customer is not ultimately served by this, neither are the agents. There is knowledge in those KMs…it’s just too often not easy to get at. This is another area that those skilled in library sciences could help with–culling the good from the bad and making it findable again. Of course, yeah, ultimately that does mean adopting a more open cataloguing system.

Those are just a couple of the ideas that struck me while I laughed my way through Annoyed Librarian’s rant. I suggest reading it, if only for fun. But she does indeed hit on some issues that are worth a bit more serious consideration.