Awareness of Web 2.0 among Participants of the 3rd LIS Refresher Course in Bharathidasan University

Internet's rapid growth and broad penetration, along with affordable enabling Web 2.0 technologies, has not only democratized access to information but also catalyzed open access publishing which has contributed mainly to the explosion of freely available digital information. This phenomenon poses tremendous challenges, and opportunities, for libraries and librarians in delivering on their core mission of facilitating research, teaching, and learning in discovering, collecting, organizing and preserving invaluable knowledge from this vast information base. A web 2.0 site gives its users the free choice to interact or collaborate with each other in a social media dialogue as creators of user generated content in a virtual community, in contrast to websites where users are limited to the passive viewing of content that was created for them. Examples of Web 2.0 include social-networking sites, blogs, wikis, video-sharing sites, hosted services, web applications.