LIBR 246-13 Building the Social Library Online

It was really great to hear from someone who helped pioneer social software uses in his library (as well as libraries in general), because at the time Chad was considering the use of blogs and wikis for his business school it didn’t seem like there were many other examples for him to draw from. I really liked his comment about his job being “pattern-oriented”, which I think a lot of subject reference librarians can identify with. After being asked the same question over and over again, you begin to think “There’s got to be an easier and quic

Of course you need policies for social software tools.  If nothing else, it's a cover your rear tactic.  Okay, so I'm not a fan of having a policy that won't allow me to add friends to the library MySpace page unless they're an author, musician, or teen that I can confirm comes to the library regularly and bears no profanity or otherwise offensive material on their personal pages.  It's social networking!  What good is a MySpace if you take out the network and the social tools?  Still, I have to go for the policy.  When you add real people, you can't predict wh

 Here is more evidence of online social networking becoming mainstream--it made CNN headlines.  In this case, Twitter helped a UC Berkeley student get out of Egyptian jail.

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The front page of the San Francisco Chronicle today featured an article about Obama (not uncommon this year), but the neat part was the mention it gave to bloggers, facebookers, and myspacers.   Many people have been commenting lately on how much organizing for Obama has taken place online.   At times I feel like my generation (of twenty-some-year-olds)  is much more disassociated  from politics than my parent's generation, but reading about the massive online political movement going on now is rejuvinating and inspiring.  We may no longer see people prote

I think my library might be particularly resistant to podcasting.  Although we are quite progressive with some issues in other cases we simply lag behind the times.

Gaming does a lot of "people training" and they do it well.  Okay, so they use a lot of intuitive mechanics to get us to do something while giving us goals to strive for.  It's not practical to give patrons goals like "the more xp/books you earn/check out, the faster you get your new flaming sword/library card."  It would be nice if libraries would apply the intuitive mechanics more often though.  Some libraries do, but some libraries just don't.

I don't think I'd ever cut it as an archivist or squirreled away in some musty storage library.  I enjoy my human interaction so maybe that's why I'm not too fond of AskNow.  I enjoyed chatting with Meebo since I do IMs and the librarian seemed to have more time for me.  They let me know I would have a wait, and I really appreciated that they didn't leave me hanging like AskNow did to me.  Really, they should have something in the chat window that says something like connecting or locating a free librarian.  Some people might enjoy efficient transactions, but I've n

This week, I'm going to mention a few blogs you'll probably want to keep up with if you're interested in keeping up with what's new in the world of virtual reference:

I have been really fortunate to find this site and although I am not too deep into the reading, I believe it will be a great help with the coming social software paper.

http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/

It is a collection of well cited essays on blogs and online community building.  I found quite a bit of other stuff through the ACM Database (at the King Library) which Meredith suggested.

This is actually kinda nifty.  I'm always curious but can't always be online.  Some genius decided to set up text notes that you send to yourself.  You text keywords and they deliver the top search results to your email or you can even do an RSS feed on it.  I've done about two test texts and it's actually pretty awesome.  I plugged in "CSS" and the first result was the w3.org site.  It looks like decent search results.  It brought up CSS (Cansei de Ser Sexy) which is a Brazillian band half way down the short results list, but if I were really lo