Brave new web 2.0 world?

Have been reading the JISC report Higher Education in a Web 2.0 World and wondering if I was born in the wrong generation. I've always seen the web as social and interactive. That's how I've always used it. One of the first things I found the brand new internet/web thingy to be good for was collaborative writing experiments. I was on discussion lists and bulletin boards from way back in the mists of time. I saw my first flame war break out in 1996 on a birdkeepers mailing list called BIRDTECH-L. I was in virtual worlds when they were text-based and known as moos and you had to move around by typing 'go north.'

Ok, so the applications are much better and easier to use these days, but it's always been possible to see the web as a facilitator of two-way or multi-way communications rather than as a broadcast medium. I'm slightly at a loss to understand why this is seen as some kind of scary new development that us old people can't understand. After all, it's just a matter of making the online world more like 'real' life, by making the online life social.

MetaLib (no, it's not a librarians heavy metal band!)

I now have a much better idea of what MetaLib can do for us - thanks to the willingness of fellow info professionals to share their knowledge and experience!

Hopefully it will allow us to present our databases better, allow some of them to be cross-searchable, add features such as alerts, bibliography and reading list style outputs, and provide (via SFX) quicker and more reliable links to full text. All good things that I'm pretty sure will be appreciated by staff and students. I think I might enjoy training sessions more with once it's up and running.

Maybe we'd get better attendance if we spread the rumour that it is a librarians heavy metal band though?