LIBR 246-13 Building the Social Library Online

When I found out about this class, I was pretty eager to sign up. I had regularly read Meredith's blog, and this class felt like my one chance to take a class with "celebrity" faculty. (I'll ask for your autograph later.) In October, I had suffered a "crisis of faith" of sorts at the CLA conference in Long Beach. After great presentations by guys like Craig Newmark (the Craig in Craigslist,) and social media expert Shel Israel, the naive questions that followed by the well-seasoned professionals in the audience surprised me in their obtuseness.

The first barrier to using social media productively is to treat it as something "exotic." When something is seen as exotic, one either fears it without reason, or treasures it excessivley beyond its true value. One should not dismiss a new tool out of hand as some strange thing only young people can grasp, while on the other end of the spectrum, one should not praise every new thing that comes along as the greatest invention since the CueCat.

Flickr can be a great tool for libraries if you used right. The NC State Library and the Palos Verdes library really use it well. When a library has such a great collection of archive photographs, it only makes sense to put them on the web and allow anyone to see them. It's so much better to have them out in the world, searchable and taggable, and not just locked up in a vertical file in a forgotten corner of the stacks.

I am quite skeptical about the benefits of Second Life. All the applications we have talked about so far--RSS, tagging, mashups, widgets--are all about users taking bits and pieces of larger things and reorganizing them to better fit their needs. These applications are small and can be accessed on everything from a full-powered desktop computer to smartphones. They are all about being simple, accessible, and mobile. Second Life is none of this. You have to meet Second Life on its terms. And those terms are fairly unbending.

Of things we read about this week, the one I'm most fascinated with is SMS. I think SMS reference is a great idea if only because it extends the library service to anyone with a cell phone--and that's just about everyone. I do wonder if SMS is a lasting tool or if it is just a stop-gap technology to be used until we all have IPhones and IPhone-like devices and we all have IM clients on our cellphones. But for now I do think texting will be around for a while.

I asked the GDP of Bahrain question at each library to help compare the two different interactions.

My pretend library MySpace was fairly simple to create. I've had a myspace page myself for a few years now, but never had gotten into changing the template. Things like changing background colors and adding widgets were new to me. The Widgetbox site that Hector linked to was very helpful. They had an RSS feed widget that was very easy to create--no HTML, or even copy-and-pasting, necessary. Also, it looks like MySpace is trying to add some Facebook-like features to make it easier to add features and edit your profile.

Personally, Wikipedia is one of my most used resources. For random curiosity, there's no better way to get a quick overview of a subject or to find an obscure trivia fact. From the history of demolition derbies to in-depth discussion of moon craters to  the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, there is something on Wikipedia to get you started. Like Liz described it, it is a great hub.

In public libraries, we use the dewey decimal system to keep books in some sort of order and to keep like items near each other, and for the most part it works out quite well. Here at home, I don't keep my books arranged by dewey decimal. It's a shelving-by-feel system--recently read books are together, novels and poetry mingle together, art books are all together, (mostly because they are all large and only fit on a few shelves,) my Complete Peanuts books are prominently displayed because they look so nice, and so on and so on.