Librarian in Black reports an interesting story about how she was informed of a campaign to save a popular TV show.

i got a MySpace friend request from a "Save Stargate SG-1" profile.  I had not even known Stargate SG-1 was slated for cancellation until I got this message.  I promptly sent e-mails as requested to the officials responsible for this bad decision (as requested by the site), went to their main campaign website, and signed petitions 1 and 2.  I'll also be sending some postal mail as well. 

The point is this--I was sent a message because I had listed "science fiction" as one of my interests.   And not only am I grateful to them for letting me know about this, but I also became an active member of the campaign within two minutes.  Fabulous!

Why can't we look for people who list "Reading" or just about anything else as their interests (movies, music, technology, games--so, just about anyone), and ask them to help with library issues?  I think this could especially benefit institutions like ALA or state library associations, when national or statewide issues arise...as it's sometimes harder to pinpoint people by individual library jurisdiction.  We need to use the tools available to us!

That is an excellent example of how librarians might be abler to use some of the Web 2.0 technologies to to develop similar interest communities across the web.

Many people might not be aware of the critical role the US governement's Library of Congress plays in the world of Librarians. It is mainly because the US governement does not claim copyright on the LC classification or subject headings that we have so many excellent public and academic libraries in North America. However, recently with the development of metadata and evolving "folksonomies" the role of LoC and their library tools are changing. In late February, the Library of Congress announced it was holding an “open” meeting on March 8, 2007 at Google's headquarters in Mountain View, California. Comments were invited. Karen Scheinder wrote this scalding comment. One of her comments which resonated with me was this one.

... we are behaving like the train companies, who thought they were in the train business, not the transportation business, and like them, there are already signs that the “train business” we do is on artificial life support. We are not even close to being the first service of choice for information seekers; we are pretty much down there with asking one's mother.

That is one of the most accurate and damning comments I have heard about libraries and it pretty much echoes my own opinions. We as a profession are fiddling while Rome burns. The ultimate result of this will be that we will increasingly become a niche service foir the aged until they decide to move us into the old age homes. In the meantime Libraries by another name, Internet Resource Centres will evolve and that will be that.