New Veneer of Libraries: Library 2.0

Web 2.0 tools are web-enabled products which support the community formation and have become popular among people who are interested in sharing. Face book, Flickr, Orkut, Linked In, bogs, Vodcast, Technorati, Whats App, Wikipedia, Rich Site Summary (RSS) feeds, Podcasts and many more have emerged as the strong media for exchanging data/information. Libraries are not left behind, and they are using these tools to facilitate users. Blogs are widely used in libraries and are created to exchange/share information among people having common interest like sharing photographs, study material, videos and even vacancies. There are other tools for cataloguing where tagging is created by users as well. There are many mobile applications like Meebo, Datarow, softcat, in-Flow Free, Zotero, Libre Office, Good reads and others. It has become a powerful tool in the libraries and librarians are serving the new clientele, particularly the young readers with many tools. Libraries blogs, tagging and instant messaging (IM) are playing major role. Through with Librarian with service, the chat sessions are established which have further helped in establishing a sturdy and robust relationship between the librarian and the library users. The remotely located readers can get answers to their queries at the same time without being present in library which saves time, money and efforts. Owing so many qualities and advantages attached to Web 2.0, which is known as Library 2.0 in library context is turning into powerful tool. The present paper attempts the tracing of the role played by the social software in turning a traditional library into a library 2.0 Library.