Week 10, #22 Social Networking

Wow, there certainly are a lot of social network sites. MySpace seems to be on the way out from what I read, and FaceBook is very popular now with people I know. I'm not sure if I'm "professional enough" to be on LinkedIn.

I looked at the 350+ sites- wow! How do people and organizations choose? I think I'll just stick to what I've got. I was glad to see that they were organized at least. I've done the BookCrossing one before, a few years ago. I left some books in various places, but I don't know if they ever got found or not. I can't remember my log in information to go back and check.

I am starting to think the Commoncraft videos are kind of cool. Maybe I've seen too many of them. Did anyone watch "Zombies in Plain English". Well done, and funny.

The commentary about how users don't necessarily WANT the library to be on Facebook or Twitter is interesting. When people log into Facebook they aren't going there to do research. They are going there to see what their friends are doing, find out what their Hippie Name is, play Bejeweled, or Mafia Wars, or post photos of their friends and family. They aren't going to Facebook to find out info they need for their research paper, or to get a list of the New York Times Bestsellers for the week. However, Facebook is useful for librarians, and everyone else as a social network. It helps us to connect with our peers. If a librarian in Maine ends up connected to a librarian in Oregon, and they decide to get married. Maybe they will have a mutual friend in Kansas who knows of a library that is looking to hire 2 librarians. Yeah, right! But it could happen. Isn't that what CommonCraft said that social networks were all about? Extending your relationships. It might not be to our patrons though, it might be to our peers. And maybe one of our peers has posted a link to a blog about how great Cataloguers are, and how much he appreciates them. Sharing links is another great use of Facebook as well, and that's useful to all of us I think.

Week 6, Assignment 12- Perspectives of Library 2.0

Well anything that says "video" is going to grab my attention a lot more than a "Horizon Report" or whatever, so I went straight to the A Librarians 2.0 Manifesto. I have been to Burning Man twice, and was thrilled to see pictures of the playa. I watched the video twice. Then I headed down the list to We Asked for 2.0 Libraries and We Got 2.0 Librarians and The Cult of Twopointopia.

Defining a "librarian" as anyone who works in a library struck a chord with me. I have heard myself say "I'm not a librarian. I'm just an office drone who happens to work in a library." I don't have an MLS. So am I librarian or not? Depends on who you talk to. The idea of "Educate myself about the information culture of my users"- I think that was from the video. That's a good one. Isn't that why everyone was learning "Second Life" a while ago? At the time I thought they were nuts, and just looking for an excuse to "play games", but now I'm starting to understand the mentality of learning those things. Reading "The Cult of..." is entertaining, and it's great to see the dialogue and comments that follow it. There are definitely people in the library who I would say are Twopointopians, and I'm sure a few are in the class. I wonder what they thought about the article.

"User-centered", libraries have always been that. "User-determined", well as I heard it said in a meeting recently, you have to balance that. Obviously if the users all want to play "Mafia Wars" on Facebook and check out porn dvds from Reserves, you aren't going to support that. On the other hand, we're not going to censor what websites our users go to on the public computers either.

"Reducing the boundaries" and "heightened awareness of social software and technologies"- Our libraries are doing this. We are open 24/5, we have a great Learning Commons, we have a vast amount of electronic resources for our users, and we're trimming the print and adding the "E" all the time. For me personally this means learning about streaming videos and e-books, and how to incorporate them into our catalog and our budgets. It means that in order to be able to afford these new medias, we may have to collaborate with other libraries and share our resources because there is no way one institution can possibly absorb the costs of all these new things.

Personally, I can't stand reading E-books, but my husband loves them, so I know that even though I'm not embracing them personally, they are coming and they have an audience. I need to keep an open mind for that.