LIBR 246-13 Building the Social Library Online

Educators who lack knowledge about social software are the biggest barrier to implementing it in my workplace.  While I believe the educators in my K-12 district are excellent, the majority do not understand the benefits social software can bring to the classroom.  Further, they are not encouraged by administrators to incorporate these tools into their instruction.  I would go so far as to say teachers and students are discouraged from using social software because access to these tools are blocked by district filters.  Teachers themselves currently cannot access bl

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

I wanted to highlight Melissa's excellent post about some of the barriers many of us have and will likely face when we try to "sell" social software in our library. She brings up some of the common objections people have to social software tools in a work setting and how to combat them.

I completely agree with Liz in her post when she says that the greatest barrier to implementing social software is the fear of the unknown amongst administrators, the IT department, and even with our colleagues. I have heard so many stories from librarians about trying to work with their IT departments, unsuccessfully, due to a lack of knowledge about what the library is trying to accomplish. It is important to build bridges with people inside the IT department and include them in planning.

Jami Haskell, who worked on the social software policy at the Washoe County Library (one of the policy examples this week), wrote an article for WebJunction on how to "Create a Social Software Policy for Your Library." It's a good, brief practical article which discusses why they decided to create a policy and how they did it. Definitely worth taking a look at if you're thinking of creating a policy or are on the fence about the need to do so.

Phil Bradley blogged about some interesting topics lately and I wanted to share with everyone.

1) Grab All is a search engine that allows you to compare results from different engines side-by-side. 

2) An article about using del.icio.us to monitor site activity with screenshots. I thought this might be useful for our metrics discussion.

We spent the past few months playing with and comparing various social software technologies, but if or when the time comes to implement social software in the places we work, we are sure to come up against resistance. (Unless you work in an office culture where technology is embraced, and even that has its downfalls.) Across the board, I think the three issues we would mostly likely face are time, training, and utility.

I thought I should share an experience my friend Amanda had the other day when she was trying to access the wiki for a workgroup she's a part of. This is a great example of why we have to be careful when choosing technologies hosted by an external company:

Although I'm not working in a library, my current job allows me to provide various virtual reference services through email, IM, and VOIP/co-browsing demonstrations. In my experience, here are 6 points that any person working in a virtual reference environment should think about:

You’ll find something useful here even if you are not a school librarian.  Joyce Valenza & Doug Johnson were interviewed Tuesday on Women of Web 2.0 (WOW2).  They shared their views on the 21^st Century school library, the changing face of books & literacy, and more.  You can listen to the recording on EdTechTalk