Category Archives: social web

A Twitterish Update

By IRIS Posted on by

Hmmmm… So I was chatting with CW Sunday night (for me, Monday morning for her) and decided to get myself a Twitter account. Why go on being completely confused by something I hadn’t tried? So I tried it, and now all of a sudden I’ve got 5 friends. How did that happen? I’m confused again. I suppose they were friends of CW and saw me that way.

So for all 5 of my followers out there, I might remember to update the thing every once in a while, but don’t hold your breath too hard. Think of the times you’ve IMed me only to discover that I’d forgotten to change the notification. Now multiply that by a million to account for the fact that I actually use IM for my work, so I try to keep on top of the notifications.

So I’m trying it. So far… it’s ok. Nothing great. But then, I don’t have family who are constantly (or really ever) online, and the same with my friends. So I don’t have the same incentive that other people might.

Oh, and Happy Birthday Steven!

Twitter Tweet?

By IRIS Posted on by

Can somebody please clue me in? Twitter looks… cute. But I don’t get it. Why would anyone care what I was doing every minute of every day? I’m really not that interesting. And how would I remember to update it every second? And… just… why?

[Update: I see David has the same question. Help us, please. I don't want to be a fuddy duddy, but I'm confused.]

[Update nearly a year later: This post still gets enough hits (and even a comment or two) that I thought I’d just clarify: I use twitter. I’m addicted to it. I’m still not convinced that a library should have a twitter account, though I know it works for a couple of libraries. But as a tool for personal enjoyment and professional connections between librarians, it’s great… except when it’s down, at which times we all curse it vehemently.)

Gimme Gimme Gimme

By IRIS Posted on by

Yeah. Big ol’ “Me Too!” on this one. Cuz why? Cuz Meredith rocks, that’s why. Oh, and the book looks good, too.

There’s a section in the first chapter (a much better teaser than most introductions, btw) that I think asks the essential question: Why should librarians care about social software? Answer it for you and your library, adopt Meredith’s answers, or do whatever else it takes, but don’t leave this question on the back burner.

My answers? Well, they map very closely onto Meredith’s, and they’re constantly evolving, but here’s a sketch of their current state. I have not found that my students are very familiar with many of the social software we talk about all the time. I’ve had students ask me why I’d want to IM, diss Facebook and MySpace, give me blank stares when I mention social bookmarks, wonder what Flickr is and point out that I’ve left of the “e.” And don’t even get me started on RSS. But that doesn’t mean that social software isn’t important to me in my library with my user community.

No, social software is still important for many reasons, but foremost in my environment is that it’s a way for me to provide value-added, nimble, real-time, personalized access to online resources and research support, learn from and collaborate with colleagues near and far, and improve my own workflow and my students’ workflows. Six months from now, these reasons will have evolved again, I’m sure. But through it all Meredith’s last paragraph says it all. These things are, above all, tools. They’re tools that help libraries stop being faceless institutions and start being teams of people helping people.

Social Bookmarking and 5 Weeks

By IRIS Posted on by

This week was Social Bookmarking and RSS week over at 5 Weeks to a Social Library (which, by the way, is the best thing to happen in online learning since sliced bread… which didn’t happen in online learning, but you get my meaning). The participants are writing such wonderful things into their blogs, and I’m learning so much from them.

I’m also remembering what life was like for me just a year ago. A year ago RSS was, for me, just some kooky techno-geeky acronym. My co-workers were buzzing about it, but I didn’t get it. (Yeah, remember when you thought a microwave “might come in handy every once in a while”?… Yeah… That’s what I thought about RSS.) My first week at work, they recommended Thunderbird as my email application for many reasons, including it’s ability to read RSS feeds. I tried not to show my complete ignorance about what that was, or why I might want to be able to read these things, by nodding, smiling, and downloading Thunderbird. It was weeks later that I finally asked somebody to show me how this RSS thing worked, and almost 9 months later before I started actually subscribing to stuff. [Update: I only use Thunderbird to subscribe to one internal library blog, which requires authentication, which Thunderbird can handle and Bloglines and Google Reader can't ... as far as I know. But it was my first intro to RSS.]

Another thing my co-workers mentioned my first week at work was Furl. They set me up with an account and told me to have fun bookmarking stuff. They even showed me their archives. “Huh,” I thought, “That’s kinda cool. I’m glad it works so well for them.” And I continued on my merry way.

Fast forward to today and the story is much, much different. I use RSS even more than my microwave, and I’m starting to be able to integrate social bookmarking into my concept of myself as a liaison librarian in ways that I would never have imagined previously. To some extent this has to do with what I’m coming to believe is a natural progression in my techno-life: I need a tool to do something for me and my own work, then I see how it can be applied more broadly in my semi-public professional life, and finally I start applying it in my curricular endeavors. Only rarely does this progression change.

But to get back to the point, I completely understand some of the 5 Weeks participants’ concerns that this is fun, but somewhat irrelevant (that’s an overstatement of their conversation, but the concern is there, I think). And I think it’s important to remember that tools are great, but not for their own sake, or even because they work well for someone else. Tools are only great to the extent that they help you and your library with your own workflow and your own services to your community.

I would simply caution anyone from writing off a tool before seeing someone else’s full-fledged and rich use of it. For me, my inspiration came from seeing Kristin’s data blog and her amazing furl account and from seeing Heather’s furl account in action as she tagged primary source collections or resources for specific classes or even specific students. Seeing these things in action, actually using them to help me answer questions at the reference desk, finally helped me “get it.” That’s when I adopted del.icio.us and started building a curricular and professional link collection. That’s when I started understanding how social bookmarking could be useful to a subject librarian.

Now I’ve got three subject pages that either link to specific tags in my del.icio.us account or link to pages generated by del.icio.us (such as this section of the Art & Art History research guide which links to this RSS-fed page). And this is just the beginning. Now that I’ve started down this path, I can see that it’s going to be an integral part of my liaison activities. I can only hope that one day my link library will be as rich as my co-workers’.

By the way, I highly recommend Jason’s webcast on social bookmarking, created for 5 Weeks (you need to view it in IE). Watch it remembering that this isn’t tools for tools’ sake. It’s a tool that can help you DO something. (Granted, the “something” you can do is becoming more and more important as more and more authoritative information goes up on the free web.) And I think that’s the test we have to put to all these wonderful tools that spring up every day. Does it do something to help me and my library, our workflow, or my library’s users?

I don’t have time to “play around” with tools, and even the wonderful idea of “giving staff time to play” is only useful if the staff have specific needs. “Playing” with new tools is time-consuming and ultimately not as rigorous a test of the tools’ worth as actually using the tools. And even then you’ll have to prioritize. For example, I love the idea of podcasting. I really do. But I’m not doing it. I’ve done the cost-benefit analysis and podcasting came out below bookmarking, teaching, research guides, copyright education, and all the rest. This doesn’t mean that in another year I won’t be podcasting. I have no idea if I will or won’t, but I know that for right now I see wonderful examples of other libraries really leveraging it for their patrons and I think, “Huh. That’s kinda cool. I’m glad it works for them.”

Libraries and Social Software

By IRIS Posted on by

Four colleagues (from three schools) and I will be presenting on Thursday on the topic of social software, what role the library can play, what networking tools the library can infiltrate -er- participate in effectively, and who is responsible for teaching (and learning) these tools.

This is my first experience collaborating on a presentation with people from more than one school, and it’s quite a challenge. How do you do all those little negotiations, so dependent on voice and body language, to figure out who wants to present what, what our shared goals are, and how to present our topics effectively? How do you put together an outline, divvy up jobs, and ultimately get this thing done without ever meeting in person?

These challenges pretty much prevented us from planning much until today. And yes, the presentation is on Thursday, but such is life. Honestly, none of our schedules meshed very well until today, but even so I think we could have stepped up a little sooner if we’d been working in the same building.

But a couple of weeks ago we did manage to get a wiki going, and as is par for the course, it’s developed kind of a life of it’s own. It has the standard stuff: the speaking outline and notes about our ideas there. But we’re also going to use one page (currently called “Our Presentation“) in place of a PowerPoint or other projected presentation guide. It’ll include a rough sketch of our outline plus all the links we need for our live demonstrations (pray for happy internet gods that day!). We’ll also have our handout up there so attendees can go back and find it later, should they ever want to. They’ll also be able to see the wizard behind the curtain, since they’ll have access to all our brainstorming and speaking notes… but I hope that’s a good thing.

It wouldn’t have been practical for us to put everything together without actually talking to each other and performing all the little negotiations that are necessary, though. It would have been to slow. So today we spent some time in conference chats with each other and then even more time actually talking to each other on a conference call. We all talked, and I took notes into the wiki, which worked out rather nicely.

Now I just hope the presentation itself goes smoothly…