What an amazing experience.  I know these past 5 weeks were pretty intense – alot of us had very busy work-lives during this time and fitting in the course was a little difficult at times – but as I’ve said to all of my colleagues, without hesitation, I would do it all again.  You know, I’ve paid for courses before – and learned very little!  Hard to believe that this was all free. 

Besides learning by using the technologies and the well-produced webcasts, screencasts and podcasts, my favourite experiences had to be the weekly chats.  This was probably the most valuable learning tool – if I wasn’t learning from my peers, I was gaining their support and encouragement.  I treasured the time I spent with these folks – being among your “peers”, even if it’s just an hour a week, can be very valuable when you’re in an environment where you’re not quite sure your efforts are appreciated (I still don’t think folks realize how much time I spend learning and implementing these new tools).

Implementing Wiki and Social Bookmarking Software

to Recommend Subject-specific Websites

- Pilot Proposal - 

Introduction

I love flickr – but mostly for personal reasons.  When it comes to using flickr in my professional life, however, I find its usefulness just slightly limiting, but here are some thoughts anyway.  As discussed in this week’s material, flickr can definitely be used as a training tool and for some information literacy purposes.  I think for the most part, tutorial software would do the job better, especially for database instruction, but I feel flickr would be an excellent tool for showing incoming students the basics of using the library – a photo-tour of the building, how to locate a book/journal and borrow it, how to locate and use the photocopiers, how to use the microfilm machines and print, etc. etc.  Flickr could also be instrumental in creating a sense of “community” around the library – a flickr group to which students, faculty and staff could contribute photos that would be shared through a feed to our website (see what the University of Manitoba is doing with their Virtual Learning Commons – this site will be interesting to Five Weeks folks on so many levels, but scroll down to the bottom for their flickr photo feed).  Besides this, have you searched flickr for photos pertaining to your library?  I have – it’s very enlightening to see what folks find interesting about your library and the dialogue that takes place around these photos.

As an academic librarian, I’m more drawn to Facebook than to MySpace for the purpose of patron outreach.  Last year, I discovered Facebook, created an account and started poking around.  I noticed there were several library profiles in there, particularly academic libraries as, at the time, Facebook was still limited to academic and corporate institutions (it now has geographical networks as well).  With the permission of admin, I created a profile for my library – no bells and whistles here, just a straight, boring profile because I really wasn’t sure what would come of it.  This was merely an experiment.  But with an interesting result…  We didn’t broadcast our presence there, nor did we actively invite friends, but believe it or not, students found us.  It began with one incoming student, from the US (we’re in Nova Scotia, Canada) looking for connections before arriving in September.  Slowly, and gradually, we began to receive a steady stream of friend requests.  We were about to take this experiment and turn it into an active project when Facebook cleaned out all the institutional profiles and we lost everything.  Although our experiment failed, it did prove that students (ours anyway) embraced our presence there.  Facebook is standing firm on its policy of individual-only profiles, and has welcomed libraries to use groups to reach out to their patrons.  I know several libraries were very put out by this; some have tried creating groups and I’ve read both success stories and rants about how disappointing these groups are.  A colleague at one of our campus libraries is now creating a group and will invite students to join.  With this group, she will be able to post events such as tutorial sessions and involve students in discussions about library services.  Another interesting use of Facebook is to observe groups pertaining to the library that students have created.  It’s very interesting to read what they have to say.

Have I mentioned yet how much I love wikis?  The ability to not only build a web presence without knowing HTML but to also allow others to edit and collaborate online completely impresses me.  I built a pbwiki last year - Recommended Sociology Websites - to be linked from my subject guide page for Sociology.  The intention was to allow students and faculty to contribute and share in the building of a helpful list.  I’ve had to hold off on implementing it due to some problems with our new website and the fact that we’ve incorporated MediaWiki into Joomla, our new CMS.  I hope to have the MediaWiki version incorporated into my current subject guide by next week. 

I am fascinated by the potential of social tagging to increase the findability of online resources – be they items in a library catalog, websites, online journal articles, open access journal articles, etc.  Like many others in this course I can think of several ways we could implement social tagging tools into our services: adding subject-specific tag clouds into our online subject guides (I haven’t figured out how to do this yet), using a network of reference librarians to submit tags to a reference desk account to help us when assisting patrons, and building a community of researchers through a social tagging network, are just a few, not to mention just how much using social bookmarking tools can benefit us personally and professionally.  I have learned so many nifty tricks through the reading material, webcast and screencast that I can easily conclude that there are many more ways to implement social bookmarking into our services that I’ve yet to discover.  My only question is: do we know how much of an impact social tagging has had on the information-seeking behaviour of our patrons?  For instance, are undergrads using delicious?  Are faculty members?  Are we offering services using a utility that is not familiar to most of our patrons?  If not, it certainly creates a teaching opportunity.  

I've been subscribing to RSS feeds for close to a year now - and I don't know how I got by before them.  I began with Bloglines and eventually read a blog feed about how you should try other feed readers.  So then I tried GoogleReader.  I wasn't a huge fan of the Google reader - I hear it has improved since so it may be worth revisiting.  I ended up trying MyYahoo sometime last fall and found that it really suited me.  I find it very easy to organize and arrange - plus you can play with your display and colour settings.  Now I've discovered that Thunderbird email has an R

The past few weeks, one of our listservs at work has been quite active with discussions concerning social software and web 2.0.  I've decided it's time to create a blog for us - a better organized fashion of posting what we've learned, articles for each other to read, and our comments on postings - rather than these tedious emails.  From what I understand, Joomla (our new CMS) can host a blog, so logically I'd like to set it up within it.  If anyone has any experience with blogging within Joomla, could you please share? 

“Library 2.0 Theory: Web 2.0 and Its Implications for Libraries” (one of our introductory readings) is simply the best article on this topic I have read to date. And I don’t say this because I instantly agreed with everything Maness says (sometimes, when I read Web 2.0 articles I feel like the converted being preached to). This is what makes this article so great – it is challenging and thought-provoking. I instantly disagreed with several of Maness’ statements only to be convinced to accept the ambiguity and possibility of all his comments.

Particularly gobsmacking were his suggestions: “While Librarian 2.0 might act as a facilitator and provide support, he or she is not necessarily primarily responsible for the creation of the content”, and “(blogs) are nonetheless integral productions of a body of knowledge, and the absence of them in a library collection could soon become unthinkable.” Will we see such changes to our roles? It seems that in Library 2.0, we are expected to facilitate discovery, not evaluate, approve, and direct users to good sources. In our 2.0 roles, we will need to foster critical thinking, since “no information is inherently authoritative and valid”. This is the most eye-opening article I’ve read and I’d love to hear other people’s comments.

Hi, my name is Linda Bedwell, a reference and instruction librarian at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia.  I’m new to librarianship - freshly hired from library school in Sept ’05 - although I bring with me 10 yrs’ experience in contracts administration and project management.  As a new librarian, I’m intrigued by new tools, such as social technologies – I guess because they’re new to all (most?) of us.  The library I work at, the Killam Memorial, is the campus library for arts and social sciences, science, and management.  We are fairly slow to add social technologies to our library services (we have just recently implemented an online chat-based reference service for users of our Learning Commons – and this has met with some resistance from library staff).   Observing this, I’ve become interested in adding social technologies, particularly wikis, to our website (which has recently been overhauled and requires some Web 2.0 touches) in such a way that garners collegial support.  In essence, what I hope to gain from Five Weeks’ is a formal introduction to social technologies, the courage to try them out, and the confidence to introduce and teach them to my colleagues, so that together we can keep our web-based services, library catalogue, subject guides, etc., current with the information-seeking behaviour of our users.