I’m reading The Academic Library and the Net Gen Student by Susan Gibbons right now. I’m not very far into it, but so far everything I’ve read rings incredibly true. As I read it, I can’t help but suspect that it will sound pretty radical to some people, and other people will be like, “well, of course!” This gets me thinking about all the books I’ve read like this lately, and it makes me wonder if we’re developing a web 2.0 canon of works defining today’s internet culture and contributing to the library 2.0 movement. Off the top of my head, and out of my reading list in the past year or so, I can think of the following:
- The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More by Chris Anderson
- Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi
- The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century by Thomas L. Friedman
- The Academic Library and the Net Gen Student by Susan Gibbons
- Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell
- The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell
- Everything Bad is Good for You by Steven Johnson
- Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual by Christopher Locke, Rick Levine, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger
- Ambient Findability: What We Find Changes Who We Become by Peter Morville
- A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future by Daniel H. Pink
- The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki
- The Cognitive Style of Power Point by Edward R. Tufte
- Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder by David Weinberger
- Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web by David Weinberger
Some are more obviously related to libraries than others. And you’ll notice none are of the how to variety. They more about the big picture ideas of what is going on with online and information culture today. Of course the true web/library 2.0 canon would have more blogs than books, but these books present theoretical structures which can inform our day-to-day decision making and give us a context in which to synthesize new information. Are there any other books you’d add to the list?
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