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

Before the beginning of the semester, I had some assumptions that I have since had to reevaluate, if not set aside completely. I assumed I knew quite a lot about social software and its potential in libraries. I spent a lot of 2009 researching the subject as I helped our library set up a Facebook page and then build its website using Wordpress. And, hey, I was already on Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr, and I had already subscribed to a ton of blog feeds through Google Reader.

At PLA 2010 (where I got to meet our very cool classmate Amy), I attended a session on social software policies, presented by two librarians and a lawyer from Multnomah County Library. You can view the PDF of their slideshow presentation and also access materials from that and other presentations on the library's MCL Presents.

First of all, after watching the videos of Nancy White, I want to say that more lectures should take place on a golf cart and involve big purple hats and sunglasses.

Here are two related links:

User participation in and contribution to library services is something to get excited about. Getting the community involved in library practices makes the public library more public. Getting students and faculty more involved in the academic library makes it more academic. Getting professionals and employees involved in a special library makes it more...special?

Last semester, I wrote a paper on crowdsourcing and participatory democracy for LIBR 200, and one of the researchers I came across was Daren Brabham. His website links to a lot of his scholarly publications on crowdsourcing.

When it comes to internal collaboration, organizational structure and culture are not so much barriers to success as they are determining factors. Staff's willingness to cooperate, to share resources and ideas, will decide how successful collaboration will be despite the technology used. I just accept that as a given. So, assuming an organization has the appropriate structure and culture in place, the first real obstacle to implementing new collaborative tools is the introduction of the tools themselves.

I found this social bookmarking tool while doing the Delicious exercise this week: Zootool. It looks like it has a lot of the same functionality as Delicious (even integrates with it, along with Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, and FriendFeed), but it has a prettier, more graphical interface.

I've been using Delicious personally since June of last year. I didn't really "get" it until I realized it was a great way to bookmark sites I found while browsing on my breaks at work; then I installed the Firefox plugin, and I've loved it ever since. I love that when I bookmark something at work, at a friend's place, or on my iPod, those bookmarks are automatically synced when I boot up Firefox on my home computers.

I had not, however, really explored the social and searching aspects of Delicious, other than a few clicks here and there. Here's how it went for this exercise: