Library 2.0: What the Term Meant and What Survived

Library 2.0 was the argument, made between roughly 2005 and 2010, that libraries should be built around participation rather than announcement. The name borrowed from Web 2.0 and it was coined in 2005 by the librarian Michael Casey on his blog. Within two years it was everywhere in the profession: conference tracks, job titles, book-length treatments, and a fair amount of backlash.

The term has since disappeared. What it argued for did not, and separating the two is the point of reading about it now.

What the argument actually was

Stripped of the jargon, four claims.

A library’s website should be a service, not a noticeboard. Readers should be able to contribute, not only consume. Services should be changed continuously in response to use, rather than redesigned every five years by a committee. And the library should go to where its readers are rather than requiring them to come to the building or the catalogue.

Some of those were already unremarkable elsewhere. What made them contentious in libraries was the implication: that professional description could be supplemented by amateur description, and that the institution’s authority over its own catalogue was negotiable.

Blogs, and why they mattered more than they look

The visible face of the period was the library blog, in two forms.

Libraries ran blogs for readers — new acquisitions, events, staff recommendations — and for the first time published on their own schedule, without going through whoever controlled the website.

More consequentially, librarians ran blogs for each other. The professional conversation moved, quickly, out of journals with a twelve-month lag and into posts answered within a day. Almost everything now understood about this period was argued out that way first. The mailing lists of the same years did the same work at a slower pace, and one of them survives: the Library Web Newsletter Archive, 2007–2011 is a weekly record of exactly this conversation being had.

RSS, the piece that did the plumbing

RSS is the least glamorous item on the list and the one that did the most. A feed let a catalogue search, a new-acquisitions list, a blog or an event calendar be subscribed to and republished somewhere else.

That simple capability produced most of the period’s genuinely useful work: new-books feeds by subject, saved searches delivered automatically, library news pulled into a university portal, feeds recombined into something neither source had planned. It was the first time a library’s own data routinely left the library’s own website, which is the thread that leads directly to Library APIs and Open Catalogue Data.

Participation, and where it fell short

The most-discussed proposals were the ones that asked readers to contribute: tagging catalogue records, writing reviews, rating items, adding comments, correcting metadata.

Most of it did not work. The reason was volume. A tagging system needs a large, regular, engaged population to produce anything useful, and a single library’s catalogue does not have one. Services that aggregated many libraries, or that had an existing community of enthusiasts, did better. Individual catalogues mostly collected a scatter of tags that helped nobody, alongside the occasional case requiring moderation nobody had budgeted for.

Two lessons came out of it that have held. Participation is a function of scale, not of interface. And the contributions that turned out to be worth gathering were corrections and usage data rather than opinions.

What it did to library websites and catalogues

The durable changes were to the catalogue, and they were substantial.

Before: a search interface that assumed you knew the rules, returned a list ordered by nothing in particular, and offered no way forward if the result set was wrong. After: relevance ranking, faceted refinement by date, format, language and availability, cover images, spelling suggestions, and results that behave like the search engines readers actually use.

That shift is now so complete it is invisible, which is the usual fate of a successful argument. The underlying description did not change at all — the rules behind it are set out in How Does a Library Catalogue Work? — but what a reader is shown of it did, entirely.

Why the term died

Three reasons, and none of them is that the ideas were wrong.

It was never defined tightly enough to argue with. Some people meant social tools, some meant continuous improvement, some meant an attitude, and the resulting debates were often two people agreeing in different vocabularies.

The platforms it assumed stopped being neutral. The open, feed-based, recombinable web that Library 2.0 took for granted was consolidating into a handful of companies with their own interests, as described in Social Media and Libraries. By 2012 “go to where your readers are” meant a commercial platform that could change the terms at any time.

And the successful parts stopped being distinguishable from normal practice. Nobody now argues that a catalogue should have facets.

What survived

Faceted, ranked catalogue search. Libraries publishing on their own channels without an intermediary. Iterating a service instead of relaunching it. Machine-readable outputs, which grew into APIs and open bibliographic data. And a general acceptance that the reader’s behaviour is evidence about the service rather than a misuse of it.

What did not survive: user tagging at any scale, comment sections on catalogue records, virtual branches in simulated worlds, and the assumption that a library could rely on somebody else’s platform indefinitely.

Read the period from Digital Library and it reads as the moment library collections stopped being a destination and started being something other systems could reach into — a change that mattered far more than the name attached to it.

Sources and further reading

Wikipedia’s article on Library 2.0 gives the origin of the term and onward references to the original 2005–2007 discussion. OCLC Research published a substantial body of user-behaviour studies during the same period, several of which were the evidence the argument rested on. For the profession’s contemporary account, the archives of Ariadne and D-Lib Magazine both cover the years in question and remain online.