I went to an interesting talk today about the future of library e-services, especially in the light of web 2.0 technologies. Quite interesting, a lot of ideas, maybe not groundbreaking yet but with a lot of potential i think. And quite a few people out there trying to make it real.

Check out the Shared Innovation blog for example, which gathers various initiatives. The guy who gave the talk is from Talis, a company that “provides the leading library management systems to the UK and Ireland library marketplace”. So here are a couple of examples about opening up library services to the user-centred world of the web2:

• Dave Pattern has created a script for Firefox that mixes amazon’s results with the local library’s availability of the same book. Rationale: worth having a look before buying it no?
• The Ann Arbor District Library (AADL) instead lets users comment directly the books borrowed through a funny looking interface: enter a few words of comment and they are directly transformed into some scribble on the old-fashioned card-catalog.. cool! Users can say their opinion .. (next step would be structuring their agreements or disagreements and deploy some service that reasons on that…!)
• Last but not least, GoogleMaps mashups. For example Libmap UK lets you check libraries’ catalogue through navigating a map of the UK.. a nice link to root planner and et voila your day out on sunday (mm maybe during the week sounds better..) is planned!

Conclusion: The Open University library offers already a pretty brilliant service – still I do hope that some of these innovations will arrive soon here too (btw a service similar to greasymonkey already exists!)