This preprint of chapter 9 of Exploring Digital Libraries is the first of two that consider the responses of digital libraries to the social web and to web-based practices for information seeking, learning, teaching, research, professional recognition, work, recreation and socializing. Both chapters elaborate on ideas introduced in chapters 3 to 8. This chapter’s first part examines the origins and chaotic, fast-moving nature of the social web, explores the possibility of digital libraries as social platforms, and introduces a visual framework that attempts to bring some coherence to the many confusing elements of digital libraries’ evolution toward the social web. The second part of the chapter turns to the branches of the visual framework that pertain to the social web’s existing, emergent, or potential impacts on scholarship, research and researchers.

This preprint's final and definitive form was co-published in Exploring Digital Libraries: Foundations, Practice, Prospects by Facet Publishing (2014) and ALA Neal-Schuman (2014).