Week 6 Exercise 15 - Library 2.0

The one thing that I agree most with the OCLC Next Space Newsletter articles on "Web 2.0: Where Will It Take Libraries" is that the library must be meeting the needs of its patrons. One of the ways to do this is to make searching more user friendly. The pre-defined subject searches we set up in libraries work well for librarians who know the language but not for today's general user. In the past, when space was limited, subject headings needed to be limited to specific terminology. With online searching capabilities today, we need to expand those headings to include terminology used by our patrons today. Time is really the only limiting factor to this venture. Dare we open our catalogs for users to add tags as suggested by the one article? They often seem to have more time than we do and they know the terminology they wish to use to search.