Social Software in Libraries December 1, 2006

Now that I have reached the end of this LIS757 course on Social Software & Libraries I have a much better overall picture of social software’s place in libraries. First of all, I feel it has a place. Secondly, I have to agree with my colleague, Colleen, that libraries must always examine their motives and strive for best practices when implementing any social software tools in their libraries.

On the subject of favorites, my personal selection of social software tools for libraries to implement includes a blog, RSS feeds and IM reference. Blogging adds some personality to your library website and it also provides you with an opportunity to promote your services and to teach information literacy. Most importantly, it provides the patrons with the opportunity to respond to your posts, therefore encouraging interaction and fostering relationships. This ultimately helps us to better serve our patrons. Blogging does not take a great amount of effort once you get the hang of it and you can even split up the duties amongst multiple staff members.

RSS feeds allow patrons to subscribe to updates on library events, new material, blog posts and subject-specific information. The important feature is that they actively request the information from you, and then make no further effort to receive it. One disadvantage is that RSS is not mainstream, so I recommend that libraries invest time in educating their patrons about RSS feeds if they are going to invest time in producing them.

I recommend IM reference to libraries simply because it is attractive to many library patrons, mostly the younger ones. It is low-cost and complimentary to other reference services, but does not replace them.

I think that the social software that produces results for the least effort - the low-hanging fruit as Amanda calls it - is Flickr. You simply upload a few photos, link a feed to your website and you have quickly spiced up your library web pages with ‘live’ content and have made it more visually appealing at the same time. However, I don’t think Flickr has much information literacy value. That is why I still recommend blogs and RSS feeds over Flickr even though they require more effort and expertise - they help us achieve our overarching purpose of educating our patrons and not simply attracting them (but hopefully do this as well).

The benefits of implementing a MySpace or Facebook presence depends on profile of your user group, of course. If you serve a lot of youth then I would recommend developing a MySpace presence that works hard at promoting your youth resources. Likewise for University students and Facebook. I would caution libraries not to simply create a profile page that goes to waste - you must update it regularly and communicate your services well. Otherwise it will just look pathetic.

I have not yet mentioned Social Bookmarking, Wikis, or Podcasting, because they are neither my favorite nor easy to implement for libraries, in my opinion. Social Bookmarking appeals to me, as an independent internet user, because I like to sort web pages I come across in order to find them more easily in the future. However, I’m not convinced that the average library patron would become interested in a library’s del.icio.us account, and I think that RSS feeds and Blogs would be more effective tools with which to provide information literacy training to our patrons. Therefore I do not recommend it as highly as blogging, feeds and IM reference. The idea of adding tagging features to library catalogues also appeals to me since I believe the average user would benefit from this additional searching method. However, I do not recommend this to all libraries at this point because it is a very huge project to embark on. But once it is simple, I would expect everyone to jump on the bandwagon!

Wikis may have their place in some library situations, and I will still keep this technology in my mind for a future library project, if it strikes me as the best way to do something. However, Wikis strike me as a lot of effort to implement - I can picture patrons being very reluctant to contribute content. On the other hand, I can see it being very beneficial for internal library projects amongst library staff or librarians in general (as in the case of our final class project!). Therefore I do not recommend Wikis in general to libraries, but neither do I recommend against them if they appear to fit your need perfectly.

Podcasting is a fun, unique way to get your message out to patrons. But it is also a lot of work to prepare content and stage a recording of high quality. Since Podcasts of mediocre quality cause more harm than good, I would not recommend this social software to most libraries. But I really love seeing (er, hearing) it done right!

I would caution all libraries that in order to effectively introduce social software technology to your patrons, you must first educate your staff about the benefits of the tools. They should be as excited about it as you are! Your project will fall flat without the support of those who are the face of the library to most library patrons.

That’s it for this week. To my classmates: see you on the Wiki.

Librarians, fix your makeup! November 22, 2006

First of all, I would like to send a big thanks to this weeks presenters on Podcasting, they did a great job.

Before this class I listened to a couple of podcasts that I searched for on iTunes and downloaded onto my iPod. I looked for Spanish broadcasts to keep up my skills (ha!) and found one that I subscribed to for a while, but then it disappeared. I haven’t tried finding podcasts since. I have noticed them proliferating on news websites and have considered listening to some of them, but never got around to it. I guess I just felt as though I could read and filter news faster on my own then in having someone read it to me. A little silly considering I do watch the news, but that is my prejudice. But I have heard that some people love them… I just don’t know of anyone that does. I wonder if podcasting is another ‘RSS’; that is, I wonder if I tried it out for a while I would love it and wonder why everyone doesn’t do it. Nah. I just don’t see it. For one, the podcast that Amanda assigned two weeks ago annoyed me. It annoyed me because it was 40 minutes long and too many people were on it. I suppose this tells me that I would not like to have a distance course given entirely through podcasting. This week’s Educase reading helps me articulate why - it mentions that a downside to podcasting is that, when it is not done by a professional broadcaster, it can sound very amateur-ish.

But for arguement’s sake I think I will look for Spanish music podcast (Ritmo Latino!) and try it out for a while, and maybe try a news channel (CBC!).  Ha, I’m addicted to Ritmo Latino after one minute!

Now onto libraries using podcasting. I’ll start with the good. I really like the idea of broadcasting children’s storytime, like the Thomas Ford Library’s click-a-story (thanks to this weeks group presentation on Podcasting for that link). What appeals to me most is that I feel that the storytime librarians are professional presenters who are skilled in voice projections. But what about the pictures! I always liked the part where the librarian showed the pictures. Another great podcasting idea linked from the group presentation is the Waterloo Public Library’s city history tour, which they lend out on iPods and accompanied with a city map. People pay for audio tours in some cities, and in a lot of museums, so why not?

Now, in saying I’d start with the good, I implied that I would get to the bad/ugly. However, I didn’t hate any of the library podcasts I came across. To me this means that librarians have already thought of some great ways to use the technology and that we can feel free to imitate - thanks everyone!  This is not to say that all the good ideas are taken.  I think one podcasting trend in the future will have to do with the fact that Apple and other iPod-type devices are trending towards larger screens.  I see this as a sign that videos will be more popular than ever and podcasts should at least come with good cover art.  Librarians as vidcast/vodcast stars?

I have 1 friend! November 6, 2006

I just signed up for Facebook!  Being a bit on the edge of the age group using Facebook (i.e. TOO OLD), I’ve never felt the need to do so, and apparently neither had my friends (Facebook lets you check if any contacts from your email addressbook have accounts). But I found my classmate Susan!  I doubt that I will continue to use this service, since I feel rather lonely on it right now…

After reading Identity Production in a Networked Culture: Why Youth Heart MySpace (Boyd) I admit I was curious to see my classmate Shauna-Lee’s perspective, since I know she was a teacher. I gained a lot of perspective from Boyd’s article about how teens use sites like MySpace to practice ‘identity production’, and Shauna-Lee sums up perfectly the “benefits to teens of online social networking: 1. Identify experimentation; 2. Identify formation; 3. Peer-validation; 4. Solidification of social groups; 5. Formation of social skills; 6. Tool for information sharing” from this week’s readings.  Thanks Shauna!

There is a lot about the Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA) in this weeks readings, and how this US Act will restrict the types of online services public institutions will be allowed to provide access to.  The most important result is that poor youth will be hit the hardest by this act (as discussed in the article The Moral Panic over Social-Networking Sites), since they do not have home PCs and rely on public computers (libraries and schools, mostly).  Poor youth will no longer be able to keep up with their more wealthy peers who have 24/7 access to PCs in their homes and are free of the government’s restrictions.  While tearing access to a crucial part of youth culture away from the poor, the government will be doing little to protect youth from predators, who are generally known to the victim and most often related.  Furthermore, by blocking access to a few sites you will not succeed in protecting youth, since other internet sites will still pose a danger to youth, and since other social networking sites will quickly pop up in their place (just as how new downloading tools crop up whenever a popular one shuts down, i.e. Napster). Henry Jenkins nails the solution when he says that to truly save young people from online predators, we need to “teach social networking in the classroom, modeling safe and responsible practices, rather than lock it outside the school and thus beyond the supervision of informed librarians and caring teachers.”

The DOPA act would also rob US educators (including librarians) of using these tools in instruction.  Henry Jenkins article discusses a thesis by Ravi Purushotma that puts forward many uses of social software for delivering innovative instruction.  I can relate to the language instruction comments, being a Spanish major, and I have often thought of how much more interesting and relevant some of my classes could have felt if they involved more learning outside the classroom, on my own terms, and catering to my own interests, through social software tools like blogs, podcasting, flickr, etc.  From looking at library’s foreign language collections in the past I know that funds must be scarce in those areas since books always look well-used and old - web content, especially the social software content, is current and free!  It would be a shame to loose this instructional option just as it is catching on.

And if you are looking for a shortcut this week, the last article Discussion: MySpace and Deleting Online Predators Act nicely summarizes everything.

Don’t forget to poke me on Facebook!

Exploring Folksonomies After Midnight November 2, 2006

D’oh… reading week has melted my brain and I forgot to post this LAST WEEK!

The Lawley article has an interesting start - discussing the potential ‘evil’ in folksonomies, such as deliberately mislabeled items. I have wondered about how advertisers could misuse tags to promote their product (simply add the ‘most popular tag today’ to your item and wham-o!). But this article changes direction pretty quickly to discuss some intriguing implications of a tagging game - that taggers copy others’ bad choices without thinking in-depth about the best tags. While it is a good cautionary tale, I must agree with my classmate Gonzo Librarian who says “It’s possible that this weakness may be a consequence of that particular game, rather than an inherent flaw of folksonomies.” But I do often find myself looking at the suggested tags when labelling my items… hmm… I will think more critically about my choices in the future!

We’re reading two articles by Carol Ou this week, White-Paperish Thing (about distributed classification), and folksonomy? ethnoclassification? libraries? wha?. The first one is a 2003 blog post about the potential of “a system of distributed classification” for electronic journals, which seems pretty forward-thinking to me. The second one is from 2004 and discusses “partial ethnoclassification” or “distributed classification,” a happy classification medium that lies between leaving it all up to the users or paying huge sums to a librarian.

The podcast Talking with Talis: the Library 2.0 Folksonomy Gang was long. This is why I forgot to post! I decided to go to sleep and listen in the morning. My initial impressions of the podcast were not related to folksonomy: it was great to recognize some of these specialists names, thanks to this course; it was a nice way to spice up the homework, Amanda; and it is a little difficult listening to so many voices on one podcast, it sounds a bit like a conference call; podcasts are harder to quote than articles. These speakers tend to share the general opinion that folksonomies and tagging should be used to compliment traditional classification systems, and are excited about putting some of the control into the users’ hands. They debate implementing restrictions on tags for library systems, such as suggesting words for patrons to select, so as to avoid having too many similar categories in use. But the key point is not to have librarians dictate the folksonomy, but for the suggested words to come from previous entries from other users. Yikes! They just chatted about reordering the books in a library according to users’ tags. I am not a fan of that idea because I think the key point of tagging is so that the individual can find it, not the collective, so one person’s tags could be very random to another person. The discussion about the special implications of mis-tagging in a library situation was very interesting. Both sides offered a good point: people will inevitably become upset about seeing a racist tag in a library setting, but on the other side internet users are used to filtering out such offensive content. I think librarians will have to monitor the tags somewhat, at least to remove offensive ones that have been brought to their attention. Finally, one participant poses the question - who would want to tag a book in a library? How would you achieve a significant number of tags? We must all consider this before getting to excited about its use in a public library for books.

SocialSocial October 18, 2006

Well, after all this time using del.icio.us we’ve finally made it to social bookmarking! Great! One theme that appears again and again through this week’s readings is Hammond’s concept of ’selfish’ vs. ‘altruistic’ tagging; Udell’s ’self-interested personal information management’ vs. a ’social’ system; and Porter’s ‘personal value’ vs. ‘network value’. What they are all talking about is the dual nature of social bookmarking: first and foremost people who use del.icio.us are saving bookmarks to use at a later date, but they are also (perhaps not intentionally) tagging web pages for other del.icio.us users to find. This commentary has made me aware of the uselessness of some of my tags to anyone who is not me (lis757_required) and the usefulness of others (SocialBookmarking).

For me, these (random) points also stood out from this weeks readings:

• tagging does not use the hierarchical structures of formal classification systems, it is flat (Hammond)
• a disadvantage of tags is that they are often ambiguous becaues people use them in different ways, for example I may tag restaurant reviews ‘food’ while someone else may tag recipes ‘food’ (Mathes)
• Flickr lets you have spaces in tags while del.icio.us doesn’t (Mathes)
• I have the del.icio.us extension for firefox and use it all the time, but I didn’t notice the sidebar feature (Hollenback)

Finally, thanks to these readings I can see how tagging would help patrons better retrieve items from library catalogues (as a supplemental method to teaching them traditional keyword and subject searching) and next I will explore the case studies to see how libraries are responding to this need…

Wiki time October 11, 2006

Let’s get right to it… So you want to build a wiki? is a fantastic starting point for thinking about Wikis in the context of libraries. I agree that it is crucial to give your Wiki a theme and purpose and to start it off in order to encourage participation. The other article by the same author, Using Wikis to Create Online Communities, provides concrete library wiki ideas: subject guides, annotating the catalogue (patrons add book reviews), community wikis and staff wikis. A specific idea of a library staff wiki comes from Angela Kille, and that idea is for librarians to set up a wiki to share common reference questions. What a great idea! I can’t think of any reason why a library wouldn’t do this!

Oooh, and I can’t belive anyone can start such a clean article by saying the author “grooves on tools that are fast, cheap, and out of control.” But they did, and the article contains content, too. The WhyWiki section holds very practical examples of how some UBC groups are using wikis, which lead me to think that most groups could find a great use for a wiki. But to temper my enthusiasm, the article titled On uses for wikis and gardening states: “The key is to use wikis to fill a need, not to find a need for a wiki because you want to use a wiki.” Good advice.

On a personal note, I’ve been working with myLIS570 group on Google’s Writely to build our presentation. Writely markets itself as “Free web word processor which lets you share and collaborate your work online.” It is pretty much like word crossed with a wiki - it allows for you to see who has updated the documents, the various versions, and to revert to any version, much like a wiki does. It is working really well for us and saves a lot of emailing back and forth.

I’ve been playing with the Wiki group project’s PBwiki and have created my own page: Heather’s Page. It is pretty boring because I was just playing with a template and not adding any real content, but there is one good link in there if you can find it I’ve used this tool before but I was pleasantly surprised to see some new templates in there, especially the group project template which I think is a helpful starting structure.

Taking a look at this week’s case studies, the first thing that struck me was that some of them look really bland. The two best-looking sites are: USC Aiken Gregg-Graniteville Library powered by PMwiki and Bull Run Library powered by PBwiki. But some of the other PBwiki sites look too boring and wiki-ish, so I would consider using PMwiki, so far. I like the simple idea of running a book club on a wiki, like Princeton Public Library did, but I can see it having more ’staying’ power if it includes recommendations from someone really well-known like Nancy Pearl, on her sort-of Wiki WetPaint site. What could libraries do for this? Perhaps the Mayor, the University President, or another quasi-famous person could be talked into contributing a few book recommendations, and of course your local librarians! Maybe you could also include NYT book reviews, but I admit I am not certain on the legality of this. I also like the creative idea of the Wyoming Authors Wiki idea, because I think you would automatically earn the participation of the authors and of some local educators.

Uh… Is anyone else frustrated by the Butler WikiRef - what is it for? I mean, I’ve read the introductory paragraph, but I don’t really see how it serves reference users (at least not in a user-friendly way). I clicked on a few of the links in the ‘directory’ and the ‘complete list’ from the homepage, the only pages I could find useful links to click on, and I was dissapointed by the meagre content. It made me wonder if it was a new resource, or just unpopular, but I couldn’t find a ‘last modified’ date anywhere and therefore left feeling even more frustrated.

I want to share! October 4, 2006

Great, having built a library intranet at my last co-op, I can appreciate how easily Feed2JS & RSS2HTML would add dynamic content to any webpage - you get fresh content on your website with no further effort required! I played around with them and previewed the results, but I’m pretty sure WordPress doesn’t allow you to insert this code (please correct me if I am wrong), to add a RSS feed you simply go to your ‘Sidebar Widgets’ editing page, drag and drop a ‘RSS 1′ box, hit the ‘configure box’ in the right hand corner of your new ‘RSS’ 1 widget, insert the link, title and choose the number of items to display. Simple!

The OPML generator appeared to work for me… I made an OPML of 5 different library job sites, three of which I created using FeedYes, so be warned they may not display perfectly. I included ‘The most recent Information Management and Librarianship jobs from www.jobs.ac.uk‘, OLA’s Graduate jobs, USA Combined Library Job Postings, U of T’s FIS jobs, and UWO’s LIS Canadian jobs.  If you have any ideas of sites I should add, please send them my way and I’ll fix up my OPML!

This week’s case studies are all great examples of the feeds McKiernan was calling for in 2004, TOC’s of current journal articles from publishers, or in this case, database providers. I thought ProQuest’sDissertations & Theses RSS feed, a service that notifies you each time a theses or dissertation in a select subject area is added to their database, is so necessary in the academic environment. I’m actually really hoping for the chance to share this service with someone who may need it!

Week 5: Reading more on RSS October 4, 2006

Although it seems a few of these library RSS feeds have since died, I still appreciated Gerry McKiernan 2004 article’s compilation of library RSS links. The Ohio University ‘Business Blog’ especially intrigued me because it is done in WordPress and has a great survey up on the Sept 25, 2006 post. I suppose this is a privately hosted WordPress version?
I am glad of the Weblogs and RSS in information work article for this statement: “Libraries should be guiding users to appropriate weblogs, as they do for websites or discussion lists, though identifying those of value is more difficult since the proportion of ‘serious’ ones is lower.” And for demonstrating that another difficulty is keeping the links up-to-date, since a few on this article aren’t functioning - nor are some links on the pages linked to by this article functioning, like Library Weblogs featuring a dead link to our prof Amanda’s former blog, Bibliolatry. Too bad I can’t snoop any further! But returning to the point, I think it would be valuable for librarians to recommend blogs on particular subjects, just like the author of one of the blogs I ‘reviewed’ for this week’s paper has done with law library blogs on her site Novalawcity.

From the article Success Story: RSS Moves into the Mainstream at the University of Alberta Libraries, we learn how the feeds at U of A work: “The RSS feeds for New Books by Subject include second level LC classifications, allowing the user to subscribe to the feeds for TJ – Mechanical Engineering, and Machinery and TP – Chemical Technology, for example. A subscription to the relevant RSS feeds ensures that users will not miss any new books announcements, such as when they are away at a meeting or on vacation.” I had assumed for some silly reason that the feeds were linked to keyword searches so I’m glad I have been corrected. I am very excited about the obvious great uses of this service! At my co-op jobs I distributed table of contents services and CCOD’s, both of which took a lot of effort and felt quite robotic - RSS could help librarians get around these nasty mechanical duties & make libraries into impressive hubs of efficiency.

In regards to the Bloglines, Flickr, and del.icio.us make RSS delectable article, I’ve enjoyed getting my classmates del.icio.us tags in Bloglines for the past month. But can anyone tell me why you would want to use the service Philip mentions in his last paragraph, Pasta?

The ‘wow’ factor September 28, 2006

Great work, libraries, with your RSS feeds! While Tacoma PL and U of Oklahoma’s uses of RSS were the most conventional, they were very impressive in their categorization. Signing up for a feed of my library’s new books in a personal or scholarly interest is very appealing to me.

Hennepin County Library offers ’subject guide’ feeds which appear to be a librarian’s suggestions relevant to a pre-existing subject guide, posted approximately monthly (at least this is the case for the Ready Reference feed that I added to my Bloglines). This is a unique idea, and I love unique ideas, but as a patron I think I would prefer RSS feeds on new acquisitions that interest me.

All (except NHMCCD) offer ‘current library events’ type feeds, which is really a great, essentially free, marketing tool.

I was intrigued by Western Kentucky U Library’s obscurely titled feeds New Stuff and Old Stuff. I thought it was brave of them to use these titles, and that the curiosity factor worked for me!

It’s great to see a whole collection of journal article RSS feeds altogether at NHMCCD. But there is no ‘wow’ factor on this page, I feel it is missing something. At a minimum, more spacing. But back to the RSS - this would save the library a lot of resources if they could set this up rather than the old-fashioned Table of Contents Service, and the use of technology is where the patron would see the ‘wow’ factor.

The Kansas City Public Library’s RSS feeds page has a high ‘wow’ factor. First of all the graphic is great, and offering ‘most popular guides’ is very helpful since they have 47 feeds! The feeds themselves are a mashup of librarian tips, library events, and borrowed feeds from Yahoo. I’m a big fan of this combination idea - but aren’t they missing new acquisitions? Correct me if I’m wrong…

Creative blogging thoughts, anyone? September 20, 2006

I’ve decided that I’d better write this post before I go looking at all my classmates sites and feeling as though all the good ideas are taken. Here are my creative library blog suggestions:

1) A virtual bookclub. Not nearly as much fun (I’ve heard the best ones involve a lot of wine and gossip), but perhaps more productive.

2) A community event review board. All those involved in community events love any opportunity to promote them and they would likely make the bulk of the posts. This would be a simple way to draw in new bloggers, people who otherwise may not visit the library website.

3) Unemployment blog. Job hunt tips and links, recommended outings on a budget, profiles of people who change careers. Lots of possibilities.

On the case studies:

Darien County Library’s coverage of their application for a new library is a great idea. It would definitely interest all their loyal customers, although it is boring for the passerby.

Lamson Library’s recently added items blog is a good example of using blogging to promote your new resources. But fire up the scanner, I’d like to see way more pictures. The right hand column feature ‘most popular’ is really handy, but they could highlight this even further and perhaps put a ‘librarian recommended’ section in there too. Even better, have a section featuring recommended books by community members with simple profiles - change the profile every week and bam!, you have current content which would appeal to our slightly snoopy side of human nature. I suppose the best part is that it is all automatic, thanks to some wordpress magic. Nope, the best part according to my interpretation of the Jenny Levine article is that any library can customize their catalogue, now that it is churned out through wordpress, with a simpler skill set then it takes to customize a typical library catalogue. Librarians can blog reference questions on the fly and add tags to catalogue items just as we are doing in del.icio.us. Sounds great!

So this is what a bunch of teachers’ blogs look like (MabryOnline.org). I can see how it would draw students and parents in, its just too bad the teachers’ sites I clicked on were really boring. I can’t help but think that an academic library could gain a lot of undergrads loyalty by posting some pre-first-week information for all those keeners out there. Yes, all those kids bored of their hometown and horrible summer job who just want to dream about the fun they are going to have at university… so draw them in while they are keen, I say! Tips on information literacy could be peppered in to the discussion in moderate amounts. Other topics could include clubs, intramurals, jobs, loan procedures, etc.

I’m not won over by the GameBlog. I feel like there must be a billion blogs on gaming out there and why would you want to read your library’s? I’d like to hear about their use statistics. Maybe I’m wrong, though, they seem to have a big gaming community by the looks of their Summer Smash Tournament. I suppose it is all about noticing your communities interests and running with them - it can’t hurt to try, right?

A Library Suggestion Blog is a good idea, too, so that people realize they are welcome to make suggestions and so that they can see the reasoning behind whose suggestions are feasible and whose are not. It exposes the decision making process that is budget vs. community needs/wants. I can’t really see becoming a regular reader of something like this, though, I would only re-visit it to see a response to something I had posted and now that I think of it why not just email? Hmmm…