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Category: Tools and Technology

When the Social Gets Personal

Published by Iris on Thursday, January 10th, 2008

We in library land spend a lot of time talking about the “social” web. We create Facebook profiles, MySpace pages, sign up for Twitter, and let people know what we’re thinking by writing blog entries, commenting on blog entries, and IMing each other… and that’s just scratching the surface. There are more social spaces online than any one person could possibly keep up with in a lifetime. And they serve several distinct (and sometimes conflicting) roles. We talk about wanting to seem more relevant and approachable, inserting ourselves were our patrons are, “personalizing” the library. We also use these tools to build our own professional networks, exchange professional wisdom, troubleshoot problems, give encouragement, and just plain hang out with each other. Beyond that, I’m sure lots of librarians have a personal space or two online where they can connect with friends and family on a less-library-related footing.

I don’t know why it continues to surprise me, given the shear volume of interaction, that the social web is more than just social. It’s personal. I don’t mean “bare the hidden secrets of your family” or “gossip about people” personal. That’s almost never advisable. No, I mean “act kind of like an extended family” personal. For someone who’s never had boatloads of friends (being content with a few really good ones), I hadn’t expected to develop such close ties with people I’d never seen in real life. I still marvel that several of my very best friends don’t know what my voice sounds like when I’m excited, or have never decoded the set of my jaw and realized that I’m concentrating.

Even so, some of these people know me better than my extended family does (and mine is a fairly close-knit extended family). They know when I’m bursting with good news, when I’ve had a rough day, and when Pippin has snuggled in for a good cuddle-n-purr session. And what really gets me is this: they actually care to hear these things, just like I care to hear about similar things from them. Personally, I can’t imagine most of my cousins being interested in that kind of information.

This kind of personal affection and interest was highlighted this week when somebody in one of these social circles was killed in a car accident. I didn’t know this person at all. Our two circles overlapped, but we’d never “met.” And yet, the ripples of the tragedy spread quickly as the woman’s friends expressed shock and disbelief and spread this to their friends, who spread it to their friends, and so on. Very quickly, an entire social network seemed to have slowed to a crawl as everyone lost the will to share trivial thoughts in the face of such events. (The woman was young… my age, in fact, with very young children.)

And that’s when I realized that the social web is more than social. It’s personal. It’s intimate. And it is immensely powerful, though not necessarily in the way I’d thought before. It’s not enough just to “be where the patrons are.” I’ve never thought that sounded right, somehow. I’d hear that phrase and imagine it being like standing in the lobby of a dorm feeling foolish and not doing anyone any good. No, being involved with an online social network more than that. And if we don’t admit that to ourselves, I think we set ourselves up for stress, anxiety, and disappointment.

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Strategically Planning for Library Technology

Published by Iris on Friday, January 4th, 2008

Here’s a not-so-hypothetical question for you: What key technologies or kinds of technological trends should go into a three-year strategic plan for library technology?

Just brainstorming here, some of these are in the works and some of them may not be appropriate… but hey, I’m brainstorming.

  • Get a new catalog (boy, do I ever wish!)
  • Better platform for research guides (more interactive, less massive-block-of-text-ish, etc)
  • Clickers for classrooms?
  • Better space for assistive technology in the library
  • Evaluate space in terms of increased laptop usage and make printing from laptops possible
  • What about making the library mobile-computing friendlier?
  • Do we know what technology will be needed as we plan and implement a data service?
  • Implement federated search
  • Continue with the on-going project of evaluating/tweaking the library site
  • Continue to explore ways of integrating library services into Moodle
  • Continue to collaborate with the IT department as much as possible
  • Create better space for the manipulation/creation of multi-media projects
  • Here’s a vague one: keep thinking about how to make stuff easier to get to online.
  • I don’t remember where we are on our digitization initiatives, but I’m sure that’ll be part of this.
  • Continue to look for ways to put help at point of need…. that’s another vague one.

I don’t know what other departments will want or need, but luckily, I’m not the only one thinking of stuff to add to this plan.

I enjoy taking time to think about this kind of thing, but at the same time it feels weird. I already feel like if I want to try something, I can, and if our department needs to use or implement new technology, we get the support we need. So I guess I need to stop thinking of it as a “here’s what we wish we could do” document and more of a “here’s what we’re likely to want to try” document.

But I know I haven’t thought of everything. In fact, I feel a little less kept-up on emerging trends right now than I have before because I had to put other priorities ahead of that one last term. So what am I missing?

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It Happened… At Long Last

Published by Iris on Thursday, January 3rd, 2008

I’ve tried Google Reader several times in the last year. I kept hearing other librarians falling head over heals in love with it and wondering what I’d missed. But each time there was something that fundamentally disrupted my feed reading flow. I couldn’t have labels I wanted (it didn’t like having multiple labels having the same beginning word for a while there), I couldn’t rearrange the order of the feeds and simply could not function with that draconian an adherence to alphabetical order… lots of little things.

But over the past few days, Bloglines hung up on me one too many times and I thought I’d test out Google Reader again. After all, with the world of perpetual beta you never know if the problems that irked you 2 months ago will have been solved. And lo and behold! They had been. I imported my feed collection with no problems, rearranged my feeds to my heart’s content, and began reading away.

The only thing I don’t like is that it forces me to see what other friends in my gmail address book are reading. It’s not that I don’t like these people or their feeds. It’s that I don’t have the time, and I don’t have the will power NOT to click on a link that’s bold with new items. That new-item bold is hardwired into me as something that needs to be cleaned up NOW.

But I think I’ll stick it out this time. Hopefully in the next few months they’ll add a preference that kills this particular version of water torture.

Update: I cannot for the life of me figure out the “All Items” link in Google Reader. It routinely has more items listed than the sum of all my new items below it. In fact, I just clicked on that link and read all the items in it… the screen is now blank of new items, and it STILL says I have 13 new items. I don’t! If I do, I can’t see them. Grumble.

Update 2: After a few days of watching the phantom “new items” number climb and climb for no known reason, they suddenly disappeared this morning in the middle of my blog reading. Yay! Now it works as I want it to work (except for the annoying Friends Shared Items thing… but I’ll deal).

Last Update, I promise: So it appears that I get to cycle through weirdness and normalcy. The phantom “new items” number grows and grows each day until one day it realizes that it’s lying and clears itself. It stays clear for a day or two, and then grows again. I’ve decided to find this amusing.

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