Welcome to Week 5: Bittersweet...

I can’t believe we’ve already made it to the last week of the course! It’s really gone fast, at least for me. Week 5 is all about selling social software at your library. I think so often, people think that a good idea is enough to make something happen in an organization, but there are usually a whole host of barriers to overcome in implementing social software including securing administrative support, getting staff buy-in, getting buy-in from IT, training staff and/or patrons on the new technology, making a plan for maintaining and sustaining the new technology, and marketing the new technology. Not considering these issues, and others, can kill a project before it’s even been implemented. This is why your final project centers on creating a proposal for the tool you wish to implement. If you can clearly articulate what you want to do and answer any important questions that will likely come from admin and staff, your project will be much more likely to succeed. The proposal is due tomorrow (Monday, March 12th) at the end of the day.

We’re also asking you to reflect on your experiences in the course. Your comments will be really important, not only to us, but to those who replicate this program in the future. Our hope in creating this course is that it will be replicated by others, since we have created an easy-to-follow roadmap and collected quite a lot of useful readings and lectures that can be reused by others (so long as they are also offering their course for free). Your observations will help others to determine what they might want to tweak when they offer a similar program themselves. I may actually contact each of you after three months and find out where you are in terms of implementing social software at your library. I think it would be really great to actually get a sense of how this has affected not only your understanding of the technologies, but also how it has affected your place of work in the weeks and months after the end of the course.

This week, we have two excellent screencasts and one narrated PowerPoint (with audio) which touch on some of the issues integral to successfully implementing social software at your library.

Kathryn Greenhill has created a screencast that brilliantly recounts her experiences creating a staff development project to learn about Web 2.0 tools. A puppy with a new ball: Engaging library staff in social networking tools during the MULTA project will be useful to all of you who are considering how to get staff up to speed with these new technologies. Kathryn will be available for a chat on Tuesday March 13th, at 7pm Eastern.

Library Branding will look at “the ‘Big Picture’ of making your library social (online), the library brand and what perceptions you may need to overcome with users, as you start to implement social networking software tools in your library's everyday activities.” Alice Sneary and Alane Wilson of OCLC will be available in the chatroom on Wednesday March 14th, at 3pm Eastern.

Finally, in Library 2.0? No, thank you! Obstacles to Creating a Social Library (PPT), Kate Peterson, Plamen Miltenoff and Melissa Prescott articulate some of the potential objections to implementing social software and how librarians can be prepared for and counter those objections at their library. They will be available for a chat on Thursday March 15th, at 3 pm Eastern.

I just want to tell you how privileged I feel to have had the opportunity to work with and learn from all of you. I originally got the idea for this course when I became aware of the serious lack of free online educational opportunities for librarians in this area (that go beyond the one-hour, one-off lecture). I believed strongly that a course like this could be created using free tools and partnering with organizations with complementary missions (like OPAL), and I am amazed and pleased to see that we were able to accomplish this. I had no idea, however, how much I would learn from this class; from all of your observations, reflections and questions. You all have made me see so many more possibilities for how these technologies can be used and have led me to question some of the assumptions I held about these tools. I am so grateful to all of you for broadening my horizons and it is my fervent hope that you were able to benefit from the course in some way.

Remember that the content from the course will be available after the course is over, so if you didn’t have time to check out a Webcast, screencast, podcast, blog post, etc., it will all be archived here for your later viewing pleasure. Five weeks is such a short amount of time to learn all this stuff, so I think it will be great to come back to this in the future once you’ve recovered from the whirlwind that was this course.

I'm looking forward to our final group chats this week and to reading all of your proposals! You all are AMAZING!