Editorial: Moving Toward Web 2.0

LJ debuts a better web site

By Francine Fialkoff, Editor-in-Chief, fialkoff@reedbusiness.com -- Library Journal, 3/1/2007

By the time you read this, the new face of LibraryJournal.com will be well on its way. It's due date is early March, but birthing a web site is about as exact in its timing as giving birth to a baby. You know it will arrive after gestating for a certain period of time, but even your doctor won't guarantee the date.

In fact, the tech folks here are more definite than most obstetricians, and the gestation period has been a lot less than the 40 weeks it takes for a baby to emerge. We've been on a fast track since the New Year, working with developers on taxonomy, tools, keywords, the navigation bar, and more. They're doing the heavy lifting, obviously, implementing better search, creating additional functionality, and migrating content onto the new template.

The new site is much more powerful than the current one and takes us squarely into the 21st century. It incorporates a slew of standard features we've long wanted and that librarians have embraced, including blogs and podcasts. It puts TalkBack right on the homepage, where it should be, with discussion threads. It also has ubiquitous RSS feeds and social bookmarking tools like del.icio.us and digg, which can expand the conversation among our readers, so LJ is not just a one-way or even two-way exchange.

Years ago, Marylaine Block, zine publisher, self-described “Librarian Without Walls,” and longtime LJ contributor, wrote, “By combining peer-to-peer journalism with traditional library journalism, [library publishers] could smoothly transition a new generation of web-based librarians to their magazines” (“Communicating Off the Page,” LJ 9/15/01). The new site will help tie the old and the new together, bringing a greater diversity of voices to LJ. As I write this column, I'm also recruiting students (via email) for a student blog and debating with staff the finer points of a name for a staff news and views blog that will bring their takes on library-related news, quick links to info, and story updates.

Best of all, the new site exposes all the content LJ offers, both in print and electronic form. That was one of the great frustrations with our current site: if we couldn't find content we knew was there, how could our users? Looking for Xpress Reviews (web-only reviews of hot titles, graphic novels, and computer books), Prepub Alert, Roy Tennant's Digital Libraries column, the Bookroom blog, email newsletters (LJ Academic Newswire, LJXpress, and Críticas)? Good luck. With the new site, just mouse or move your arrow over the navigation bar, and the drop-down lists will take you straight to them.

Once the site launches, we'll be able to tweak it based on user feedback, though the design and functionality are pretty much set in stone—until the developers devise another new feature or offer a complete upgrade. After all, the “old” LibraryJournal.com is only a toddler itself, having been born in June 2005. Within a month of its arrival, it experienced a growth spurt. Users—and some of our contributors—told us loud and clear that the pay wall for articles and other formerly free features was a barrier (“The Wall Comes Down,” LJ 8/05).

Does the new LibraryJournal.com have everything we want? Of course not. We're still waiting for simpler blogging software, the ability to throw up wikis, and user discussion forums (the last may be on the radar already). Nevertheless, the reinvented site takes us farther down the road toward Web 2.0 that librarians themselves have gone. And that's what we want.