If selling means giving away candy...
By yvonnereed - Posted on April 29th, 2008
Trying to sell social networking tools to some colleagues is like pulling teeth. Sometimes it may be painful but in the end they’ll be glad they did it. I’ve been playing with lots of different types of social networking tools for several years (especially in this class). Sometimes I’m not too impressed and can’t see how it will be useful down the road but I like to be familiar with it for that “lightbulb” moment in the middle of the night. Fortunately, in the class many of my classmates have had those “lightbulb” moments for me and now I can sleep undisturbed.
Recently, while talking to my supervisor we were talking about creating bibliographies and themed reading lists for the summer. Picture books are sometimes very difficult to locate because they are almost always cataloged under author. The library assistant is always searching for and pulling books for displays based on seasonal/holiday themes.
So what if we used LibraryThing to tag our picture books and then we could easily locate them again the following year for the same display? This was something my supervisor suggested after seeing me keeping track of the new teen books on LibraryThing. And by using the scanner, adding the books would only take a few minutes. Great idea!
Creating buy-in from some of the other staff members in our department may be difficult and I was assigned to train the staff. What will be my ammunition? Well, I’ll start by showing the staff how to add books easily with the scanner. Then showing them how through the use of tags these books will be visible with as little as three mouse clicks as opposed to searching endlessly through pages of catalog results that sometimes will return everything even when you just specify picture books and Mother’s Day. Maybe some candy will help too. Wish me luck…
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