All,

 Just wanted to say first off how much I've enjoyed sharing the past five weeks with everyone and how beneficial this course has been.  I'm excited!  Now to answer the questions: 

What were your favorite experiences in the course?

For me, the group chats were great.  We shared so much useful information with each other and just the support we were able to provide to each other was very beneficial.  It's simply nice to know that our situation and the obstacles we face in implementing social software are not unique.  I did also enjoy the live presentations.  For the most part, they were not only extremely informative, but also provided great examples of social software use and were entertaining!

Five Weeks to a Social Library Final Project

For

Cheri Duncan, Head of Serials/Electronic Resources

I found the presentations this week especially interesting, but don't believe that the technologies would "fly" at my library.  We have so many staff members who are adverse to having their pics posted on our library website, that flickr with its emphasis on photos doesn't seem like a good fit for us.  Except for headshots of three-four staff members who have agreed to having their picture posted with our "Ask a Librarian" feature, the few photos of staff events that we've archived are posted on the staffweb behind a login and deleted within a month or so or distributed via email.  I don't know if folks are just generally "camera shy" or truly don't like the idea of pictures of themselves being available to anyone on the web.  We could post pix of our new building in progress, but we have a live web cam for that which is linked off the main site, so I don't think that flickr will be at the top of our implementation list for technology.

Wow!  I didn't know that there were so many good wiki softwares out there, nor did I realize that libraries were making so much use of them.  These week really built on the first week's introduction to wikis in the discussions on how they differ from blogs.  When I started this course, I was most familiar with rss feeds and had begun "dabbling" with using them in our library.  Now I'm excited about the possibilities for wikis, which could simplify so much of what we do.  Things like marketing tools, subject guides, tutorials, policies and procedures, etc.  Guess I&

After reading the material this week and viewing the presentations, I can certainly see where RSS feeds can be useful tools for libraries.  I think that, for my library, pushing information about our resouces and notifying our faculty members of newly acquired resources are two key uses of RSS feeds.  Despite our best efforts, we struggle with the issue of faculty members not being aware of or not remembering the newest resources.  It seems to take an average of about two years for new resources to catch on, but perhaps that's because the faculty need to become familiar with them before they encourage the students to use them.  Another topic on RSS feeds concerns the TOC alerts which many journal issue regularly.  I recently heard of a library that took the time to sign up faculty members, who wanted to stay informed, but didn't have the time or the know how, for these alerts.  Since many of these alerts are also offered as RSS feeds, this would be a great way of introducing our faculty to RSS technology, as well.

So far, the course is great and I'm getting a lot of great ideas.  One of the main things I learned this week was the difference between a blog and a wiki and the best use of each.  Blogs are best used for discussion threads and the like while wikis are better for multi-part programs, such as tutorials.  I do think that my library would benefit from having several sets of tutorials for patrons and staff on a wiki.  It would certainly prevent some of the repetitive training that we now do for both and allow us to spend more time on the more complex needs of our patrons and our staff.

Hello from the Shenandoah Valley in western Virginia! I am the Head of Serials and Library Management System Administration at a mid-sized university. Our university is in the process of implementing a new portal and I am among those charged with setting up the Libraries' presence within the portal. Also, we have discussed implementing several types of social software both for library staff and patron use, but none of us have had the time to investigate the possibilities. We've just begun experimenting with rss feeds. I'm hoping to have some solid ideas of how we can improve our patron service and our staff communication through blogs, wikis, etc.