Tuesday, October 10, 2006

Frankfurt Book Fair and Library 2.0


On Friday, October 6th, Abebooks was inviting for a panel discussion on library 2.0 ("Revolution im Karteikasten: Bibliotheken & Web 2.0") at the Frankfurt Book Fair 2006. My part in the panel -- as being the "Web 2.0 Experte"...at least this was written on my badge :) -- was to explain (of cource not too technically...) web 2.0 technology. The other members of the panel were Marcus Polke, executive manager of Abebooks Europe, Tim Spalding, Founder of Librarything, my dear colleague and friend Steffen Büffel from the University of Trier (together we already moderated a workshop on library 2.0 at the InetBib in Münster), and Dr. Holger Schmidt, editor of FAZ, who anchored the panel.
Despite of our topic a "real" librarian was missing in the panel, but at least there was a number of librarians in the audience, as we realized in the discussion later on. The result of our discussion was quite obviuos...as expected, everybody welcomed the opportunities that web 2.0 offers for the library business, esp. the possibility of connecting collaborative tagging systems with library online catalogues via openURL. Thus, books can be tagged by the community of all users/readers (not only by users of the local library) and the tagging information (meta data) can be used for improving search capabilities within the local library.

Another account and nice pictures of the panel discussion can be found here: