Web 2.0 in Academic Libraries in Portuguese Public Universities: A Longitudinal Study

Web 2.0 has led to unprecedented levels of communication, content creation and sharing, collaboration, and development of online communities. The shift from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 involves social and technological developments affecting several professions, with implications for library users' expectations and, consequently, for the possible futures of libraries. Therefore, it is crucial that the staff of these organizations are aware of such concepts and associated resources, including blogs, RSS feeds, wikis, social networks, multimedia files, social bookmarking, instant messaging applications, document sharing networks and personalization functionalities on search interfaces. This paper reports the results of a study aimed at ascertaining the use of Web 2.0 tools by academic libraries in Portuguese public universities, as well as the transformation of libraries' online presence through these tools during a three-year period. Data was gathered through visits to websites in 2008, 2009 and 2010, and a numerical scale with seven levels was designed to evaluate the implementation of Web 2.0 tools in academic libraries. Although most libraries (58.7%) from a total of 75 organizations used none of the tools in 2008, there was a significant change by 2010. In 2010, no library remained at level 0; 36.0% were at level 1; 8.0% were at level 2; 26.7% were at level 3; 28.0% were at level 4; and 1.3% were at level 5. However, the highest level of the scale was never attained. The most prevalent Web 2.0 resource was found to be content syndication through RSS feeds, and wikis were the least used. The results suggest that Web 2.0 tools are used mainly to disseminate information and rarely to collaborate. Future perspectives and suggestions for librarians are presented.