last post: privatising information by stealth

I put a YouTube post up on my first post so I thought I'd just cut to the chase here and give my general web 2.0 and library thoughts.
So I read the OCLC web 2.0 future of libraries link. Some very interesting thoughts from some very nerdy looking people. The pick for mind, both visually and content wise, was the fellow cheerily pictured with the boat oar and his pithy controversial comments such as "it may no longer make sense to “collect” in the traditional sense at all" (although he did leave himself a little escape hatch with his inclusion of the word "may") and "We need to focus our efforts not on teaching research skills". If this was Oprah, I'd be wooping. Though, not necessarily because I agree, but because they sound like fighting words to me, and I reckon we don't get enough of those in the library community.
Personally, my take on web 2.0 is that libraries need to get much more actively involved "from the inside" rather than whooping from the sidelines (if I can go back to my Oprah analogy, in case you missed it).
I think that using all the technologies in the learning 2.0 program is a great idea, but really I think we need to move far beyond just using other companies gadgets and gizmos to and going "wow that's pretty cool, what a nifty idea" to being the ones that are coming up with the ideas and actually inventing the gizmos.
I have said this before, but, for example, rather than encouraging everyone to use blogger, I think libraries, especially state and national libraries should be setting up their own blogging sites for their users. Where will Blogger be in 100 years? Who will be looking great grandmother Ethel's blog from when she was a teenager? Rather than entrusting all our cultural data to corporate conglomerates, why not put it in the hands of our oldest, and most esteemed public institutions, our libraries?
Frankly, I think we need to start doing these things or we will become irrelevant and then disappear (yikes).
Which isn't necessarily a bad thing (gulp). I suppose it depends on whether you're ideals are more free trader or socialist. It seems to me that public libraries are pretty much a classic example of the socialist ideal of equal access to services provided to all and funded by taxes. Which is one model, but not the only model.
It does seem funny to me though that if you suggested privatising libraries you would get a whole bunch of very emotional opposition, but there doesn't seem to be that much debate about the quiet privatisation of the information industry that is happening now by default (gee, it would have been nice to have been able to have written this blog without the spell checker telling me that I had spelt privatisation wrong because I didn't use a z...).
In this learning program, we blogged with blogger, we put our rss feeds into google reader, our photos into Flickr, our videos into Youtube and assigned it all metadata with delicious. Private companies from start to finish. At no point did libraries make an appearance as providers of home produced innovation or services.
Working for the past year at SLV, I've come across the vast and methodically produced indexes of resources that have been created by library staff in the past. For example, we have card catalogues for images in magazines, articles in books and journals, music scores in anthologies, theatre programs, art exhibitions etc. Recently I catalogued a book from 1910 from the Library of Congress that was a comprehensive list of government publications for the last decade. It seems to me that libraries used to see themselves as content providers, actively providing tools for finding information. At the moment, it feels more like we have resigned ourselves to using the services of the private sector. At the risk of sounding totally alarmist and like a bit of a crack pot, that seems like the slow road to oblivion.
So what would I like to see us doing? SLV's my connected community is a step in the right direction. Why shouldn't libraries be creating their own search engines? Why are there no widgets for searching Libraries Australia from your desktop? Why can't people keep a blog as part of library genealogy websites? Why aren't libraries helping people to organise their bookmarks and tags to share with others (we seem to have fair amount of experience in the creation of metadata)?
The superficial answer is, of course, that libraries don't have the funds. The deeper underlying answer though is that, really, our society has decided that it's information is best entrusted to and run by the private sector on an advertising funded basis. Which is a perfectly feasible model. But if there is anyone that would feel uncomfortable about "public" libraries, say, putting up billboards for retail products in and around their buildings and in the front covers of books and on their web front pages, then that would seem to suggest that we ought to be having at least some kind of community debate about whether we want to switch to a private model of information custodianship, as we are doing at the moment.
Personally, I think what would make me whoop what be seeing a little "powered by OCLC" logo on a google page...