It's a library Jim, but not as we know it.

While the city takes forever to do something with the Central Library in Birmingham, the library world itself is beginning to contemplate a revolution, and it is called Library 2.0.

As you might guess Library 2.0 owes much to current Web 2.0 ideas. What happens once you give users the tools to create their own content, and repurpose the content created by others?

Carrying the standard for the Library 2.0 is Birmingham based company Talis - market leaders in providing management systems to libraries.

According to Talis, Library 2.0 is "where libraries use some of the exciting technology now becoming available to transform the library service into a rich user experience whether people visit it in person or online." They're even running a competition to test the idea out.

Talis recently demonstrated a Library 2.0 plug-in that they've developed for Firefox and Amazon. Whenever you look at a book on Amazon the plug-in looks up its ISBN number against a holdings database and pops up a window showing which libraries have that book in stock. "Don't buy it, borrow it" is the obvious message.

It doesn't take too much thought to think of some of the other ways in which Library 2.0 could lever Web 2.0 technology.

Mash up holdings data and Google Maps and you can see not only which libraries locally have the books you want, but which books are set, or talk about, the place you're looking at in Google Earth.

Looking the other way you could even do post-code level mapping of who else is reading the book you're reading (several media sites already do such "neighbour" lists ). Amazon and Library 2.0 are obviously well matched, reader reviews on Amazon working just as well for Library readers.

The book you want is on loan at the moment?

Just click through to Amazon to buy it.

And what about all those MySpace users? If they've written about a book then why not bring that review in too, or dynamically generate a top ten books of the MySpace generation.

My current favourite mash-up tool, is SIMILE Timeline. This has been described as the Google Maps of dates and times, letting you plot any time based data on an ever expandable timeline, with resolutions running from Millenia down to milliseconds.

Timeline could plot all the books the library has on particular periods in history, or show an authors work in publishing order, or even show a minute by minute track of what books were loaned when.

The great thing about Web 2.0 technology is that it doesn't take tens of thousands of pounds to do any of these things. With the right data and right web interfaces available a reasonably competent programmer can produce a working (if not robust) application in a day.

With Web (and Library) 2.0 there is no excuse for not trying this stuff out - even if in the end not every idea works.

In fact, Library 2.0 stands a better chance of working than many other Web 2.0 ideas.

ISBN book numbers mean that there is a (more of less) unique way of representing every book by a simple code, so mashing data from several sources is easy to do - there is a common key.

Elsewhere we have few, if any, equivalents. But the web community has realised that and work has started on a new standard, the INFO URI, which will give us a way of labelling everything.

At that stage Library 2.0, Web 2.0 and the semantic web may well be only limited by your, or your users', imagination. n David Burden runs his own information consultancy, Daden Consulting. Past articles and other musing can be found on his blog at daden.co.uk/blog and he can be contacted at david.burden@daden.co.uk