The Cybrarian's Web 2: An A–Z Guide to Free Social Media, Tools, Apps, and Other Resources is a useful guide to all sorts of free platforms and programs that will make any librarian's online life easier. Its scope ranges from productivity and creativity tools like Adobe AIR to microblogging infrastructures and collaboration and course management systems like Udutu. Each entry in this lexicon is structured in the same fashion, starting with the URL and an assigned category, followed by an overview, in which author Cheryl Ann Peltier-Davis describes the history of the developer and the scope of the resource. This is followed by a features section, in which she summarizes the resource's major capabilities in an easy-to-understand fashion. The most useful section of each entry is easily the last one, “How Cybrarians Can Use This Resource.” Here, Peltier-Davis provides a clear usage context to help budding “cybrarians” understand how the resource under discussion may be implemented in their own work environments. “Fun facts” about the resource often round out each entry.
Peltier-Davis has done a great job curating this guide; the resources she has selected fall into 32 broad categories. These include archiving and note-taking tools, wearable technology, course management systems and crty owdfunding platforms, digital publishing services, MOOCs, self-publishing platforms, and many more. The guide is organized alphabetically, which can become tedious when looking for a tool that would address a certain set of tasks or functional area, or even when looking for a quick one-sentence summary of a tool, but Peltier-Davis provides for these kinds of functional searches in the Appendices. Appendix II contains a one-sentence index describing each resource featured in the pages beforehand, Appendix V sorts the tools by mobile device type, and Appendix IV lists all resources sorted by their categories (yet without the concomitant URL, which requires the user to thumb through the main parts of the book again). In contrast, Appendix II enumerates all the URLs mentioned in each entry, and Appendix I contains tips and teaching tools for keeping up-to-date with emerging technologies and new resources.
The weakness of very application-specific books like this one is that by the time they go to print, some of the content is already at least partially outdated. This is why Appendix I is a crucial read for anyone studying this book—and the author might, in future editions, do well to include it in the Introduction. It asks, “How do we as cybrarians stay current with all these quick-fire technologies and fast-paced changes in the digital workplace” (p. 309)? Peltier-Davis answers this question by positing her book as the beginning of a discovery and experimentation process. Besides calling for a continuously reviewed institutional social media policy and a daily routine social media monitoring process, she also advocates for the mobile-friendly optimization of the library's online user interfaces and content delivery.
Her final thoughts ring very much true: A cybrarian's job is never done. Keeping up with, learning to use, and then tailoring emerging technologies to an institution's individual needs requires intense personal and professional commitment. Within this context, The Cybrarian's Web 2 is a book that should be on any cybrarian's—and, in fact, any librarian's—desk.