LIBR 246-12: Web 2.0 and Social Networking Tools (Fall 2008)

1. How has your view of social software changed since starting the course? This course really opened my eyes to so much. Though I already had experience with using blogs and wikis at work, I gained a better knowledge of how they could be used with our patrons and how they can foster community through participation and interaction.

I have to confess that I have wiki fever. I love creating wikis, adding pages, uploading files and images, and deciding how I want to organize the various pages and content. Over the summer the other circulation technician and I migrated our physical manual into a wiki. It gave me some great experience. As we approach accreditation in the spring, our library director is requiring the rest of the staff to create policy/procedure wikis (Oh, no! What have I started?!). Some of the staff is a little reluctant in tackling this new technology.

I came across this pre-conference presentation that I wanted to share with the rest of you. Steve Lawson is the Colorado College Humanities Librarian. He offers a lot of really great resources if you are interested in further exploring this topic.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/7395383/Academic-Library-20-Handout-Learning-from-Flickr

You can also explore the wiki for the Academic Library 2.0 here:

I love the video tutorials that we looked at this week. At my library we have a tutorial on our webpage, but it is a series of slides. I think that the videos are much more engaging than just clicking through a series of screens. I see people doing this every day--not just for the library, but for the school in general. Going through an online orientation is part of the requirements for enrollment. Boring!! It literally is just a series of screens that you read and answer questions about. You print out your quiz results at the end.

I came across this slideshow by David Free of the Association of College and Research Libraries from August 2007. He does talk about some of the same podcasts Meredith covers, but I still found his content informative. You can check it out here: http://www.slideshare.net/dwfree/podcasting-and-vodcasting-in-academic-libraries/

For those of you who may not know it, there's a lot of great art in the Pasadena City College Shatford Library. In cooperation with Sandra Haynes, Art Department Professor, the Library created podcasts discussing the Artist in Residence program. You can explore the art and listen to the podcasts here: http://www.pasadena.edu/air/index.html 

I love the idea of having information to go. With podcasts, libraries can avail themselves of a great tool. In thinking about how they can be used at my library, I feel that it would be a great way for us to market new resources and services. Right now we are doing a trial of Safar Textbooks and Learning Express Library. There is only a link to them at the bottom of our homepage. With a podcast, students could download and hear about the latest library news. We also have an exhibit in our main entrance that came from NASA, but in looking at our website, you wouldn't even know it.

For this exercise, I chose the first question. I went to the AskNow website to use the QuestionPoint service. I have actually sat it on a reference session with one of our librarians at my work to see what it was like from the professional perspective. It was very interesting. However, I had not used the service to ask a question. I was very pleased with my experience. I didn't wait long at all for a librarian to log in and start chatting with me. Also, I was so thrilled when the librarian pushed a website to me!!

I am currently reading a book called Library 2.0 Initiatives in Academic Libraries, edited by Laura B. Cohen and published by the Association of College and Research Libraries in 2007. In this book, there is a chapter entitled IMplementing IM @ Reference, and it's all about how the George Washington University Library implemented IM reference. Personally, I LOVE the idea of IM reference!! I can even do this from my phone!! It's so convenient in today's mobile world!!

I know this article is a few months old, but I still thought it was relevant to what we're doing. In the June 2008 issue of Computers in Libraries (Vol. 28, No. 6), there is an article on page 10 called Chat Widgets on the LIbrary Website by John J. Meier. The article discusses various widgets, including some of those that we're exploring this week. The article is available through the King Library's Library Literature and Information Science Full Text Database. Actually, this particular issue of the magazine is chock-full of some really great articles.