Farewell, LIS 757, I have learned a lot. For our final week tasks I am to comment on which social software tools I will continue using. Definitely Bloglines and Del.icio.us. I have been using them throughout for many other reasons than this class and I have become addicted. I hope to return to some of the other tools and try them again - one at a time - because it became a little overwhelming at times to try out 2 or 3 tools a week. I’m certain I will check out Flickr some more and I would like to explore CiteULike a bit more since I’m using RefWorks a lot lately and have a few complaints!

I’ve enjoyed trying to find my ‘blogging voice’ and trying out WordPress. They seem to have ironed out some of the glitches lately and I will definitely stick with them. I’m going to try to continue blogging - after a little break - but I have yet to decide what I’d like my ‘theme’ to be.

I’ve enjoyed this distance course very much - I had one distance course before in this MLIS program and didn’t learn nearly as much. I feel like the workload has been very comparable to a regular class but that I’ve learned much more. Good work balancing it, Amanda! I read your ideas for future classes and agreed with them all. Best of luck in your future classes

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.

Just in time for this week’s topic, CBC News has posted an article Podcasting download volume lagging behind buzz: study says.  It reports on the Pew Internet & American Life Project Podcast Study done this August, which indicated that only 1% of internet users download a podcast on a typical day, and that 12% of internet users claim to have ever downloaded a podcast. Significantly, this last number is up 7% from February-April.

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’m using a blogging break this week, but thanks for checking!

I can’t resist mentioning that Zotero is asking librarians for help promoting their tool across campuses.

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!

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.

It’s a race to the finish!  See how far I make it through the readings before midnight!

The Kroski article is a good summary of the Pros and Cons of folksonomies, but the most important message, I feel, is that “resistance is futile”! The web is so large and ever-changing that paying professionals to classify it all is just impossible - folksonomies are “better-than-nothing” so we’d better get used to it and stay on top of this technology.

The Wikipedia article seems to me like a good place to start when convincing a company/organization to take up the practice of tagging. In a special library environment tagging would be very useful since the corporation/organization would consist of specialized professionals who would share similar vocabularies and interests. If you want to classify all of the organization’s documents for database retrieval you could therefore depend on the creators to tag their items (and future readers to fix the tags), towards what this article calls an “emergent enterprise taxonomy”.  The Quintarelli article was an excellent choice for me to read next since it explains the best way to supplement enterprise tagging:  “In the direction of facing the intrinsic precision loss of folksonomies, Jess McMullin proposes to complement social classification with other classification approaches: «automated keyword extraction, tag suggestions built into the tagging tool as the tag is typed [see Google Suggest and Ajax technology], mapping ad-hoc tags to structured facets, and top-down classification oversight by information professionals».”  Great idea!

The Kome study finds that hierarchical relationships exist in folksonomies.  Perhaps I am tired, or perhaps my brain is full, but either way this librarian-speak isn’t getting through to me right now.  Could anyone help me out and let me know what the bottom line is for libraries and folksonomies?  My impression so far is that the fact that hierarchical relationships exist means good things for tagging… I am sure I am missing something deep here.

Oh no!  my phone rang.  I will have to continue this later…

I really like the looks of my new BlinkList account but I wish I could import my del.icio.us account! I know I should be able to but my passwords don’t seem to work for their export to xml del.icio.us page. I love looking at my colourful cloud, the images of the webpages next to the links, and being a ipod user I love that I can rate the sites with stars. That would be very useful for a library when social bookmarking because the users could let you know how much they appreciate your links.

I tried CiteULike out once before and magically remembered my account password! Miracle! But just looking at it again made me cringe because I remember how much typing I had to do to insert one reference.  I believe it only automatically populates the bibliographic information from one database.

I was watching for Zotero to come out!!! I can’t believe how techie I sound right now, what a fluke. It promised to do a way better job than CiteULike and it has a cooler Web2.0 name…  And check this out: “Zotero may also automatically grab LC subject headings (for books) and keywords for articles” when tagging!  That’s great news for librarians!  Now all I want to know is, how can I import my del.icio.us bookmarks???

I can’t find the links to Lansing Public Library’s del.icio.us bookmarks on their home page, but it looks like they have some well-monitored and defined categories (black_history). LaGrange Park Public Library’s del.icio.us account is a little sparse in comparison and no large theme jumps out at me. I think a library’s del.icio.us account would best serve the patrons if it had a clear purpose, or at least a theme every few months, for example ‘library month’ could be a theme for a while and then ‘black history month’ and so on.

MCC library’s homepage is clean, pretty and has some very interesting content. I think it’s great how they’re displaying the newest links from their del.icio.us account on the homepage, and even though the links don’t appear to have any theme (as I requested above) I think it works since it just looks so good there (love the graphics). One issue I can see is that some of their link titles don’t give me a good idea of the item’s content, and while this is the fault of how the pages are titled, they can change the titles in their del.icio.us account to include a further description. Another issue is that I have no indication that I will navigate away from their website by selecting any of the bulleted del.icio.us links. I think it’s always good webdesign practice to let people know if they are navigating away from your content. It is now taken for granted that people know ’suggested links’ means you will be navigating away, but since many patrons will not know what del.icio.us is they will not know where they are going when they select a del.icio.us link. It would help further if they added a ‘what is del.icio.us’ page and stuck a link to it right beside ‘we’re using del.icio.us’.

The University of Pennsylvania’s PennTags is a very interesting idea and one which I imagine many librarys will not have the resources (time, money, expertise!) to duplicate - but it is fascinating to see a University launching their own del.icio.us. I imagine they have gained the autonomy of page design and a some marketing ground by creating this themselves, but I think that the good news for smaller (or more broke) libraries is that the biggest benefits of social bookmarking can still be had through a simple del.icio.us account. I also see that users wouldn’t get lost in the general del.icio.us community with no way back, either. Let me know what other benefits you see!

I can’t find the RSS feed for the Thomas Ford Memorial Library’s delicious account on their homepage, but I think what is special about their account is that they have a link to themselves up top next to the del.icio.us/thomasford/. Looking back, Lansing Public Library is the only other one that has this. Such a simple marketing/navigation tool to bring patrons back to your site.