Communities of Practice: Web 2.0 Principles for Service in Art Libraries

a service called Twitter.2 What Twitter did was simply ask the question, "What are you doing?" All across the Internet, users are being prompted to "Leave a message. Take a picture. Make a profile. Tell us about yourself." As part of institutions where students' primary goal is to create, to produce something of themselves, this begs the question of art librarians, "What are our users doing?" "What could they be doing?" "Web 2.0" is a term which was coined by Tim O'Reilly in late 2004. It denotes a new "version" of the Web, a shift in the Internet's use and potential which has been steadily occurring since the Dot-com crash of 2001.3 What is revolutionary about this shift is not new forms of communication, but how users are making sense of information, sharing it, and creating it. This article will examine the nature of these shifts, and speculate on what the Web 2.0 innovations and their underlying principles could mean for service in art, design, and architecture libraries. By building on the literature surrounding information needs and use in the design and art disciplines, it will look at how libraries