LIBR 246-04/13 Web 2.0 (Spring 2010)

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

Libraries need to create social software policies that will protect the patron's privacy, maintain a safe public space, and ensure growth of the social network.

First, protecting the patron's privacy: Many patrons new to Web 2.0 technology might not realize how readily available information is on the Internet once it's out there. It is especially important to educate children and teenagers as to what personal information should be excluded from a posting. This might be an excellent case for pseudonymity, or emphasizing first names only for services geared towards those under 18.

Hey everyone, I was thinking about what a great learning experience the group presentations were, and I thought maybe we could backtrack a bit and learn from everyone's community dynamics papers and the resources we all found in researching our topics. I found some really interesting scholarly articles on multimedia sharing sites in researching Flickr.

It's only been recently that I've created account logins utilizing my real name. Ever since I opened my first online accounts over a decade ago (including such relics as Tripod and Geocities) I've had one username "miscamy" and I dare anyone to find something with that posting that doesn't trace back to me.

... features an article by a certain Meredith Farkas on Twitter and FriendFeed:

http://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/columns/practice/dipping-stream

In discussing what makes a great community, it might be helpful to review the communities of the future. I discovered the second annual Knight Community Information Challenge, and list of their winners from this year and last. The contest offered grants to various foundations  aimed at creating online communites. Here is the list of winning grant proposals from both years:

If anyone else is as interested in creating their own Drupal site after using the course software like I am, here is a Google Tech Talk from October, 2007 on Implementing Drupal (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfrfuCLH9sg). It's 2 1/2 years old (and an hour long), but it's definitely worth a watch.

I think the most important condisideration when chosing social software technology to create an online community is knowing your audience. In a public library setting you service patrons of all ages, from all walks of life, with a wide variety of technological abilities. Do you want to reach a broad audience, or start by developing one department's community?

I discovered this eye-opening Goolge Maps project, A Nation Without School Librarians courtesy of a post over at Urlesque.

A supplement to the "What is Social Cataloging?" video posted in this week's course optional viewing, is another (shorter) presentation by LibraryThing creator, Tim Spalding. This two-part 18 minute presentation available on YouTube was presenting along with a "Future of Cataloging" panel at the ALA 2008 conference: