Starry-Eyed…

Throughout this course, my enthusiasm for social software tools exploded each week! But the final week of this course truly provided excellent content for me to properly organize these ideas in order to sell them to my library.  The chat with Alice Sneary had me excited and buzzing for the rest of the day. We discussed various survey techniques and possible audiences. The conversation got me thinking about outreach ideas – finding the audience and figuring out ways to draw them in with these tools. It is vital that our libraries begin to think about branding and what we want to be known for, now and in the future.  

Often, I found myself throughout this course soaring with ideas but then feeling unsure just how to get people to buy-in to this stuff. I realized this week a few things: 

First I need to take a breath and enjoy what I learned. Then figure out small ways to present these ideas. It is important that I find out just what our library community needs and how have they been finding/discovering this information thus far. Alice had some great ideas for incentives to complete a survey. Provide 10 minute “help me” classes. For instance, I could create a survey for a specific audience to collect data and then as an incentive provide a short FREE class on say, Flickr.  

I think we all needed the content in week 5 to get us back to reality. After this course, we will be teleported back to our library worlds but supplied with the knowledge of these social software tools and with the power and confidence to get others on board. It seems strange to say but I truly feel like I have changed over the past 5 weeks. See what knowledge and a wonderful community like all of you can do…