David Rothman post, Library 2.0 and promoting new services mentions how he thinks that medical libraries are faced with question of whether our audience will ever want to participate in the creation of "both physical and virtual services" in the library. However, he believes that even the most technophobic clinicians will use new library services if they are easy to use and they are relevant (save time, money, hassle, prevent errors, etc.).

That is where I think we come in. We need to show how these new technologies are easy and relevant to our users. It is kind of like today's comic strip Unshelved, it is how we sell it that is going to get people to line up to use a product (virtually or in person). The problem is some things are so new to us (librarians) that we aren't always sure how to sell make it relevant to our patrons.

Think of electronic journals a ten years ago. Many were on CD Rom's, those on the web were far and few between, full text articles were difficult to find, and many articles were not in PDF. Many medical library users were still coming to the library to copy the articles from the bound issue. At the time quite frankly it was a pain in the butt to try and find the article online and print out 16 HTML pages, when it was just easier to walk over to the library and copy 6 pages of the same article. My how have times changed.

RSS feeds, mashups, podcasts, wikis may not be on the forefront of our patrons minds and these "new" technologies may not fit exactly into our library at this moment, but to ignore them and not look at ways we can make them applicable to our users, is great disservice.