Hi from Oregon
Submitted by candicewatkins on Thu, 2007-01-18 05:33.
Hello, everyone! My name is Candice Watkins. I live in Astoria, Oregon (of Goonies fame) and work as the Reference & Instruction Librarian in the library of a small community college - Clatsop Community College. I've only been on the job for a couple of months and already I can see that there is much to do and much opportunity -- they haven't had a full-time reference librarian for years. There are currently no social technologies in use at the library, but I'm anxious to change that. I have experience using del.icio.us to collaborate with teaching faculty at my previous library job, and hope to continue to find ways to use that software. I'm also interested in learning more about wikis, blogs, and, well, all types of social technologies. Basically, I want to find new ways to bring my library into this century and connect with our users. I look forward to the course!
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That's really cool that
That's really cool that you've used social bookmarking software with faculty in your previous job! I know that's something I've been wanting to do here at my place of work. We have totally scrapped our old, junky, outdated Web subject guides and are looking to create new ones. I was thinking that we could use social bookmarking to do that. People could bookmark things in del.icio.us and add a brief description. Then I could take the RSS feed of each topic and syndicate it onto the Website, creating an annotated list of links that no one actually knows is coming from a social bookmarking tool. So the stuff would be updated dynamically without anyone needing to know HTML. Since I'm the only one who knows HTML, I am very eager to come up with a plan that doesn't involve me updating other liaisons' subject guides all the time!
That's a great idea. My use
That's a great idea. My use of delicious hadn't evolved that far. I was using it as a way to gather websites from faculty that they thought would be good to include in a subject guide. I presented the idea of using delicious as a collaborative tool at a campus department meeting and while everyone was very excited about the idea, they never really ran with it. So, my question is, once we develop these great ideas and tools, how do we actually get faculty (not only students) to actually utilize them?
That's a great question! I
That's a great question! I can't wait to hear what you come up with, Candice - you sound really vibrant and ideaful (if that's even a word)!
We have begun a del.icio.us
We have begun a del.icio.us (sp?) account at our library. However, does one always have to authenticate to access it? That is, do delicious pages always require the entry of a user ID and password? If so, I can almost guarantee our staff and the faculty will not use it because we will constantly be scrambling to find or remember yet another login among the many logins we already have. Even if we post it, it is an extra click to get to the page. So, if I am not understanding something about delicious, would someone let me know and correct my wayward thinking? :)
Karen
CSU-Pueblo
del.icio.us sets a cookie
del.icio.us sets a cookie that remembers a login on any given computer. So yes, you do have to be logged in to bookmark something, but you don't have to log in every single time you do. Does that make sense?
In putting together Five Weeks, the committee discovered that one way to make life easier for everybody was to try to use the same login and password everywhere, an "open secret." IT security wonks look down their noses at this, but for a small and responsible enough population, it can work.
Just to add to what Dorothea
Just to add to what Dorothea wrote, the beauty of del.icio.us (and many other social bookmarking tools) is how easy it is to bookmark a Web page. You can put a bookmarklet (a little javascript widget) in your browser toolbar, so when you see a Website you'd like to bookmark, all you need to do is click on it and and a little interface will pop up that allows you to create a description (optional) and assign descriptive tags. It is incredibly fast and easy to bookmark things once you get that bookmarklet in your toolbar. And, as Dorothea wrote, unless you purposely log out, you shouldn't ever have to login again.
Dorothea and Meredith, Since
Dorothea and Meredith,
Since the application relies on cookies, I can see this will be beneficial for those who work from their own computers, assuming they will not have to delete the cookies to resolve other authentication issues or during routine computer maintenance.
For instance, our library uses Remote Patron Authentication to grant database access to our students, faculty, and staff. If one forgets to click "Finished" (finished with using the databases in RPA), the program will end but will still indicate the person is logged in due to placing its own cookie in the computer. The person must delete all cookies to log in again right away (unless they are techie enough to locate the cookie and delete it). If they access a del.icio.us subject guide after this time, they will have to authenticate with del.icio.us once again. Some computer programs like Symantec's Clean Sweep or any disk cleaning program will also delete cookies unless the user is aware enough to tell these programs not to delete cookies in the programs' routine computer maintenence tasks.
One other problem for us (and I suspect other institutions) is that the public computers set aside for users and patrons routinely dump settings after the user logs off the computers. In this case, the user must have written down the del.icio.us login somewhere or be able to find it on the institution's website. This last scenario affects most of our users here.
Forgive me for playing the devil's advocate, but I will have to take into account these difficulties if I want our users to access information created with del.icio.us. On the other hand, I love how this application looks and works. I guess that is what this course is all about--finding out what will work, what won't, or ways around the problems. Again, thanks for the feedback!
Karen
You definitely don't have to
You definitely don't have to be logged in to access del.icio.us bookmarks; you just have to be logged in to bookmark things. Anyone can look at my bookmarks right now (http://del.icio.us/mfsocialproject) and if I really wanted people to look at them, I could syndicate them onto a Website (sort of like what we did on this site if you look at the Feed Aggregator or what I did on this page). That way, you don't even need to make people visit del.icio.us to view the bookmarks. All del.icio.us bookmarks are public unless you specify otherwise.
I guess I'm not clear on who you want to have bookmarking sites and who you want to have viewing them. If you want your colleagues to be bookmarking things, you can have them do it from their own computer, which will remember them.
There are a lot of ways that libraries can be using social bookmarking, but it definitely needs to be tailored to your specific situation. Definitely keep playing devil's advocate; it's so important to keep your mind on the needs and limitations of your specific library situation. :)
That's exactly what I needed
That's exactly what I needed to know, that one can simply view someone else's page. The only experience I have had with del.icio.us is watching others log into their del.icio.us pages, so the login thing seemed a problem. Thanks for clearing this up for me. I can see many uses in this application now, which will work for us.
Karen
I've been piloting social
I've been piloting social bookmarking for our reading lists using Connotea, http://www.connotea.org which is from Nature Publishing and has a couple of neat advantages - it's aimed specifically at scientists, so includes fields for pretty much full citations, and they're working on a facility for offline references to be stored. Feedback I've had from our members is that they love the fact they can download the refs straight into EndNote as well as monitoring the RSS for new additions. I'd not heard of Connotea before and was struggling to see how I could get the other bookmarking software to work for our staff and members ...
I would LOVE to hear more about how other people are using social bookmarking for subject guides. Here's where I'm at with our pilot: http://www.connotea.org/wiki/User:AnneWelsh