LIBR 246-13 Building the Social Library Online

This class is liable to be point of contention for any of the more traditional employeers I might choose, or it could very well be the best selling point I have. Over this semester, I've discovered some interesting new tools and some creative uses for them in a library setting. In the course of this class, I've woven some Web 2.0 elements into my work for better or worse. I say for better because del.icio.us makes it easy to work on several computers while sharing nifty things with friends. I say for worse because now that's one more thing I regularly have to check on.

Since there are quite a few things to cover in this last post I think I might just hit them one by one rather than trying to give an all encompassing answer.

1. How has your view of social software changed since starting the course?

Since having the responsibility for a few initiatives passed on to me for creation by a librarian, I have become quite interested in policies in general.  While I think it is a great idea to start new programs in a library, it is often the case that a flash of brilliance is not coordinated with a product's continual use. 

I thought screencasting is a great way to provide reference services at a library because it pulls together so many elements that would occur in a face-to-face reference interaction. I really enjoyed doing my screencast with Jing. I thought it was pretty intuitive and a worthwhle experience.  To be fair, I regularly do screencasts for my job and find that they do help, especially since we only provide remote support (phone and email).

This week's assignment was pretty cool except for the blip tv not accepting flash part.  I initially set my preferences to web so that producing anything but flash or quicktime produced a horrible video.  My quicktime movie was optimized for an ipod so the image is kinda lame too.

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.

I have used second life both for personal entertainment and previously in a programming class.

I actually like Second Life a lot in theory.  Its a great idea to be able to go somewhere and collaborate or learn in a group environment, especially for distance students.  It allows us some sense of who our classmates are and get an underlying look at their personalities through their choice of avatars and chatting with them.

Although I was familiar with much of the information presented in the chapter, the links to different products was great!  I found a ton of stuff there that I had not seen before and was particularly impressed with dimdim.  My supervisor had been asking me if I knew any products like that a few months ago and had honestly not seem something that fully featured and FREE!

There are actually quite a few cons to tagging in a library environment, but lets start with the pros.  First of all adding tagging can really aid in natural language searching of the catalog.  With more keywords to start with the chances are better that a user can find what they are looking for without giving up too quickly.  Tagging also gets users involved with the library.  Aside from being practically useful tagging can help make the library feel like a more enjoyable place to work online.  OPACs tend to have quite a sterile impersonal quality to them and taggi

Instead of running the risk of being "all over the place" by discussing too many elements of a "successful" blog, I'm going to limit myself to talking about the three elements that I quickly saw as the most important: (1) visual appearance, (2) frequency (of posting), and (3) writing style.