Let's Get Social: Facebook and Libraries

I guess if truth be told while my "real" persona is somewhat shy, digitally I'm a social animal.

I love Facebook. If my computer is on, one (or more) tabs on my browser is open to Facebook.

Like most people I've encountered in my age group (adult) I was reluctant to play. I'm a big geek, but I didn't see the need. Couldn't be bothered.

Then I overheard some co-workers bragging about their latest high-point Scrabble scores on Facebook (note: Scrabble had to be taken down due to copyright issues and Lexulous has taken its place) and I wanted in.

And so have most of my family, friends and co-workers. We keep up-to-date with each other on Facebook, share pictures and frustrations and successes, im each other, challenge each other's word scores, feed each other's virtual puppies and lots of nonsense. We're very social with each other. In little bits, When it's convenient. We stay in touch.

I don't have a ton of Facebook friends, just a handful. I'm cautious about what I write and what others read about me. I am aware that my words will live on and take on a life of their own. I monitor my privacy settings carefully.

I've seen others get burned. Someone I know sadly had a change in marital status and thought she was privately editing her Facebook profile setting, only to be inundated with questions from her Facebook friends. Facebook notified each of her friends of her change in status. Something she had not yet told anyone about. We all learned after that that you can control what goes out and what does not, but you have to be aware.

My husband, a freelance writer, uses this aspect of Facebook to his advantage, including in his status line a call for help when needed on story or a link to work he's completed. People do read these things and respond.

So, keeping in mind the issues involved with privacy and longevity of your words on the web and policies of who owns your words, I think it's very appropriate for libraries to join in and be part of the social stream.

In the early days of the web libraries debated their need for a web presence. No longer. Libraries understand the need to reach their patrons where they are. And in a 2.0 way. People want to interact on the web; they've come to expect it -- to register for programs on line, to participate, to share what they know, what they think. These social networking tools are already in use and popular.

In my opinion, libraries should be there. I'm working on creating a Facebook profile for my library.

Experimenting with Flickr Slideshow

Hey, I've Been Flickr-ed!

I've really warmed up to Flickr. But only recently.

Years ago my introduction to Flickr was by ambush. Unknowingly, a colleague posted pix of me in a group from a workshop we were attending. I wasn't pleased. It felt like an intrusion. It led to some very interesting (and heated) discussions about public vs. private rights. It made me sensitive to what's being posted and getting permission and so on. (I still disagree with the colleague who still maintains "going out in public implies permission.")

What has won me over to the flickr camp is its 2.0-ness. I love the ability to share, to search, to find what you're looking for, to find what you never expected to find and if I'm honest, to snoop.

Would I post my pictures there? I guess my answer is a firm maybe.

I don't take pictures. My husband is the photographer in our family. He's the one who took the pictures of our yoga retreat in Peru that are featured in my slideshow. Years ago, he started storing pictures on the web when the web was 1.0 at a site where you shared your photos by invitation. It was revolutionary at the time. Easy to view, easy to control. Still, even knowing only our friends would see them and only by invitation, I was strict about wanting to okay which pictures of me were posted. I usually hate any picture of me and I usually okay only the bare minimium of pictures that proves that I, too, went on the vacation.

Lately I've been using flickr a lot. Not to post, but to view. Either directly at flickr or through facebook, I've enjoyed seeing pictures of friends' grandkids, pets, weddings, etc. I've used flickr to see strangers' pictures of foreign cities and sites we were planning on visiting to get an idea of how tourists dress there. I've used it at the reference desk to find pictures I couldn't find in google images. And I looked, sometimes with shock (no awe) at friends and colleagues photostreams and seen pictures of them half-clothed, half-drunk and totally silly. And I wonder. I wonder about their judgement, common sense, and willingness to share. And I wonder what might happen with the pictures and who might see them. Future employers? Potential spouses? Potential voters? Grandparents?

I feel less than enthused about sharing my own personal pictures. I chose the pictures for this week's assignment with care, keeping in mind I'm making them public. It's like setting them free to exist on their own on the internet and that makes me a little nervous. I wonder why everyone doesn't feel that way. And I guess I'm kinda of glad they don't.

As to avatars, it was fun creating one. At first I tried really hard to duplicate myself digitally and then had a huge laugh when I realized I could create an all new identity. I've done that before.

My facebook picture is this jaunty squirrel:



On the internet, you can be whoever you want to be.

And as I said above, I'm a bit camera shy.

Wacki for Wikis

I'm a huge fan of wikis. I was introduced to the wiki at the Internet Librarian's conference a few years back and instantly fell in love with the concept.

More collaborative and providing more potential depth than the blog, I've been using wikis professionally for some time now. And I love them.

I have one wiki that I started when I first began to create my new department at the library which deals with training patrons and staff. It's just for me. I'm the only contributor and the only reader. Because a wiki is so easy to update and to have internal and external links and is on the web regardless of the computer I'm at, for me, it's a wonderful planning tool.

At first I used it mostly to come up with my department's mission and goals and my own to-do list. The wiki easily accomodated my first drafts and subsequent refinements. But since then, I've used it to collect not only my thoughts, but also materials for presentations and then organize them into a flow. It's convenient, private and very easy to use.

I later created a wiki for the department where we can keep rules, procedures and department notes. The settings allow me to control the access level according to the staff member's individual needs. Some can view only; some view and edit.

Expanding on this idea, I got a notion to experiment with the wiki as a committee. I chaired a committee which had as its charge a goal to accomplish. Everyone involved was "committeed out" at the time. We met once and then experimented with accomplishing our task by exchanging ideas and planning on the wiki. It went fairly well after everyone was comfortable using the tool. I don't know that I preferred it, in the end, to face-to-face meeting, but it was an interesting experiment.

In the near future, I'm hoping to use wikis as an extension of our library's website. I see the tool as an easy way that subject specialists can communicate with patrons without having to learn html coding or have access to the web server. They could create a wiki that they could control and then we'd link to it from our website.

For example, I'd like our popular materials specialist to create a wiki in which she lists new additions to her collection. Within her wiki she could have a page for each media type and/or genre with links to our items in the catalog. Right now the "TV on DVD" titles are very popular and people are always asking, "do you have the nth season of whatever in yet?" With a link to her wiki page with this information , the patron or the librarian helping the patron could easily see if it's here, on order or whatever and easily browse what else is new.

I'm also thinking that book discussion leaders could host a wiki for their group, letting the conversation expand beyond group meeting day. These pages could enrich the discussion by pulling in relevant web resources and possibly audio or video clips.

There are lots and lots of possibilities for wikis. But then, I am wacki for them.

Do You Hear What I Hear? (Do You See What I See?)

Podcasts, video casts, I love them all. Okay, I'm an Internet junkie and a geek and love all the bells and whistles the Internet has to offer.

I love these technologies for they democracy they offer. The whole world can share thoughts, expertise, ideas and plain silliness. I think it's great.

I can't choose between them to name a favorite. For me, they each have their place.

On my iPod, I currently have episodes of the radio show This American Life and some casts from Yoga Journal. I love the Yoga Journal ones. When they first started offering instruction you could subscribe to and download, they offered podcasts. I enjoyed loading them on my iPod and listening to them, focusing on the instructions. Now YJ offers the option of audio with or without video, which is great. I can choose which option best suits my needs and I can do both on the iPod Touch. You don't have to go to the class, it comes to you. Same for lectures, radio shows, and people sharing their thoughts.

I love YouTube. I love the scope of things you can find there. We've used some of the "in Plain English" videos in computer classes we've taught here in the library. As we've seen in this class, their clear and breezy style makes learning a complicated topic so much easier.

As mentioned previously in this class it seems like people are finding all sorts of practical uses for YouTube videos, including reference resources for papers. I love that librarians are using videos to teach library skills, such as how to place a hold, to share projects and programs, and book reviews. Our teen librarian, Jenn Barnes, in a blog posting of a book review, included a YouTube trailer for the book read by the author.

I like the idea of TeacherTube, a specialized targeted collection of casts. Maybe we should start a LibrarianTube as well. Or maybe tagging will reach an art form and specialized collections will easily sort and resort themselves out according to our needs.

For the millions of people who are visual learners, YouTube offers instruction you can see. The scope is amazing. You can use YouTube to learn a knitting skill, debone a turkey and tie a tie. The examples are endless. I love that when you google something videos are frequently included on the first page of results.

And I love all the weird, funny, wacky stuff on YouTube.

When I went to look for my favorite video, Cat Flushing a Toilet, I was delighted to find a new, improved version set to music:



Oh, yeah, that reminds me. Last June my husband and I went to Peru for a yoga retreat. We were remarried at Macchu Picchu (it's a long story). Before we went a friend sent me this Llama Song video which was stuck in my head the entire time. Sorry if this happens to you:

LibraryThing -- Yay! Rollyo -- not so much

I love LibraryThing. It's attractive, easy-to-use, interactive and is a tool that I know will grow with me as I discover more and more uses for it. I love how easy it is to add books. You see the covers and know instantly, that's my book. You can add tags of your own choosing and then sort and resort your collection in ways that meet your individual needs. I love that you can explore by topic or by others who own the books you do. It's much of what I love about libraries -- having a collection, keeping it some kind of order and sharing with others.

My first instinct is go home and enter all my books and think up tags for them. [But then again I've got my knitting waiting for me at home, so maybe LibraryThing will have to wait a bit -- I think I'll enter things gradually -- maybe by topic or alphabetically or .... hmmm]

Now Rollyo, I'm not as enthused about. I like the concept of being able to choose a collection of vetted sites and search them for what I'm looking for. I think that has some merit. I could see a classroom teacher using it with a class where the students were to be limited in their research to a select group of sites. That might work.

For me, though, a big part of what I love about the Internet is the randomness and the serendipity -- the stuff you find on your way to looking for something -- stuff you didn't even know was there.

I'm going to keep an open mind about Rollyo and play with it a bit more before I decide about its usefulness to me.

I wasn't a big fan, however, of setting it up. I found it challenging to produce the url I knew I needed to have for my discussion post. It wasn't intuitive or easy to set up or to use. I found it difficult to figure out the results on the results page; which were my sites, which were others, which were ads. (Why are there ads?)

I did not find it easy to add to my list of sites without installing something extra. I expected it to come with a feature built in so when I came upon a site I wished to add I could click a button and add it, not have to cut and paste it in. [If I missed something, please let me know.]

In sum, I appreciate being exposed to both of these sites this week. I was unfamiliar with them both and they expanded my concepts of "things I can do on the web" to accomplish familiar things in new ways that include being part of the web community.

See You Later, Aggregator

I like aggregators like Bloglines a lot. At least in theory. I have a Google Reader account which sits on my iGoogle page. I see it everyday. And yet, somehow, I forget to look at it until I'm overwhelmed by the number of posts I'm behind on.

I suppose for me it's a case of my intentions being so much bigger than the time I've got to accomplish them in. Between my various email accounts, my facebook postings and those of my friends and our online games, and print magazines and whatever book I'm reading there just isn't enough time.

But I do love the concept. The blog posts come to you. You can read at a glance what they're about and decide to read on or skip. And it's just so darned easy to sign up for just one more.

In fact, many of the blogs I was interested in subscribing to had "Bloglines" subscription buttons, which made it very easy to sign up.

Using Google Blog Search was okay. Like all searching in Google, I found the success of your results depends on your search terms. In looking for blogs to add, there were a few blogs I knew about and could search for them fairly specifically and they were easy enough to find. Then I decided to find a random blog on each of two topics of personal interest. The number of blogs returned were huge and it took some sorting through them to find something that appealed to me. I had to sample them to find a voice and choice of topics that I found interesting. If I had had a clearer idea of what I was looking for, it might have been an easier search. But the serendipity of it was fun. And I know I can always sign up for more....

(uh oh)