The Web 2.0 information Professional:OLJ task

What essential knowledge and skills will the information professional of the 21st century require in the web 2.0 world?

I believe the Information professional will need to:

• Develop an understand of the how and why people seek information and engage in learning in the digital world. What platforms and technologies do patrons use to overcome specific problems. How are they connecting with information and people in the existing digital networks? One particular library went to the lengths employing an anthropologists to do research studies into patron social/learning behavior. However using and testing the technology will allow us to do allot of this sort of intelligence gathering at far lower dollar cost. If we gain an understanding of the digital social and information ecology that surrounds us we will be well placed to build a place for ourselves within this ecology.
• The information professional will therefore have to have a good working knowledge of the Web 2.0 technologies out their that the patrons are now using. Many librarians now manage Blogs, Wikis, web sites and OPAC's and build a diverse range of audiovisual digital content to fill these platforms. Many will also incorporate content into a variety of remote reference services platform and channels. Active content building will be important. Librarians will have to become builders rather than just gatekeepers of content.
• This will require a degree of cultural change. New ways of producing and distribution information and knowledge present new challenges. Existing institutions are now being challenged by the Googles and Wikipedias of the digital world. Information is no longer as bound nor is its production as centralized as it once was. These will present a range of new financial, technological, organizational and legal challenges for all information professionals and the institutions they work for. As Alvin Toffler prophesied some time ago we are entering a world of rapid change requiring continuous adaptation and learning.
  
• Most importantly though the information professional will have to continue to do what they have always done and bring information and people together. In this sense the web and web 2.0 represents and opportunity rather than a threat. The ability to dynamically link people and documents together in new and interesting ways has great potential. Developments in Web 2.0 can be leveraged to facilitate a process of interaction and access between learning communities and a libraries resources repositories.