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U.S. public libraries and Web 2.0: what's really happening? '2.0' is just the beginning--public libraries will continue to evolve in an effort to give their patrons the best service possible.

Article Excerpt
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In the last few years, technology-savvy librarians have begun turning their attention to a host of new tools to connect with their users and colleagues. The umbrella term for these new technologies--Web 2.0--began gaining traction in 2004. Many librarians were quick to embrace the new wave of technology. Early adopting libraries used blogs to initiate contact with their patrons, wikis to collect information, and social networking sites to connect with each other and their communities. The trend was strong enough that in 2006 ALA Tech-Source published a Library Technology Report titled "Web 2.0 and Libraries: Best Practices for Social Software" and followed that up with a 2007 update, "Web 2.0 & Libraries, Part 2: Trends and Technologies." 2007 was also the year that the Internet Librarian conference built its theme--2.0: Info Pros, Library Communities, & Web Tools--around the concept of interactive technologies.

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Against this backdrop, Colorado State Library's Library Research Service (LRS), where I serve as associate director, undertook the study "U.S. Public Libraries and the Use of Web Technologies" in the spring of 2008. Among the extensive discussions revolving around best practices for implementing Web 2.0 tools in public libraries and the multitude of examples of how to reach out to users via these new technologies, there seemed to be a hole in the literature. Nobody was talking about how many libraries were adopting 2.0 technologies or how those libraries differed from their peers who were not venturing down this path.

The Purpose of the Study

The purpose of LRS's study was threefold: 1) identify the proportion of public libraries in the U.S. that were adopting a specific set of web technologies, 2) determine how these libraries differed from their peers, and 3) attempt to determine whether the early adoption of web technologies can help drive library success, as defined by traditional statistical measures of public library achievement. In other words, we wanted to determine which libraries were adopting 2.0 technologies, how "successful" those libraries were, and whether adoption of these technologies was contributing to that success.

To accomplish this, we pulled a sample of public libraries in the United States from the 2005 IMLS Public Library report (at the time of the study, this was the most recent national...