Simon Chamberlain’s library weblog

Timothy shares his library orientation presentation, made on Google Docs with images from Flickr.

Meredith asks if any libraries are assessing their use of social technologies.

Annoyed Librarian on deprofessionalisation: “Many librarians want to turn libraries into community centers, but there’s one interesting thing about community centers that a lot of excitable librarians haven’t noticed. Community centers don’t need librarians. They don’t need people with “advanced” degrees in libraries or information or whatnot. They just need people to staff the cafes and plan stuff.”

Micheal Lorenzen on teaching with Wikipedia.

Jessica Hupp lists 25 useful social networking sites for librarians.

Lee LeBlanc on online vs offline education: “What I’m tired of is hearing outdated opinions about how horrible all online education is. That’s just not true.”

I’ve taken a couple of online courses, and I have to say I found them hard - I sometimes had problems hearing the lecturer or my classmates; we often spent time dealing with the technology instead of communicating; and the lack of visual cues made class discussion harder (face to face, you can see if someone wants to talk, and speak up if no-one does. Online we often sat politely in silence wondering if someone was going to speak). And yet: I enjoyed both courses more than most others I’ve taken, and I got my best grades in these courses. A product of the content/the lecturer? I don’t know. I still feel as though the online courses weren’t as good as the face-to-face, but my performance suggests that they may have been.

Nicole Engard on Brewster (Internet Archive) Kahle’s speech at Code4Lib.

Kyle at TameTheWeb on putting virtual reference in the user’s pocket (via cellphone): also a guest post by a librarian, Joe Murphy, who has done just that. I’m still not convinced of the value of 160-character reference transactions, but for short simple questions there’s clearly a role for SMS (me, I need more than 160 characters just to say hello).

Dorothea Salo on (among other things) why writing works better for her onscreen.

Connie Crosby on whether wikis belong in law firms.

Freakonomics on whether social networking is good for society. There’s an interesting suggestion that people might form more homogeneous friendships if they form them online, “cut[ting] themselves off from serendipitous encounters with those who are superficially different from them, ethnically, socio-economically, and even in terms of musical taste.” If anything, I’ve found the opposite: I’ve met people online who I could not (or would not) have become friends with in real life.

Infonatives on ten brainless things an online academic library can do.

Chris Wilson at Slate points out that most edits on social-media sites are actually performed by a small percentage of users. Yep. While it’s true that a large percentage of those who go online have participated in the read/write web, most of them haven’t done so to any large degree, in spite of the rhetoric.

Phil Bradley recently posted a list of Library 2.0/Web 2.0 books. There are a lot. I’ve recently read several of them,  and I’ve been left wanting more. Not because the writing was bad or the content was bad or wrong or anything like that, but because none of them really told me much that I don’t already know. Sure, I picked up a few things, but overall I’ve read four books that basically told me the same things (blogs, wikis, RSS, podcasts, gaming) in slightly different words, with slightly different emphasis.

Again, I want to stress that it’s not that the content was poor; more that I felt I knew 80-90% of it, and so would anyone who reads the same sort of blogs as I do. Clearly, then, the books are targeted at a different audience, one more comfortable offline, but (presumably) interested enough in learning about new technologies to read a book about them. A target audience of outsiders, not insiders.

So that’s my problem: I’d really like to read a book that was written for people who already have some basic knowledge, who don’t need to read a two-page explanation of what a blog is*.  Does anyone have any suggestions?

The books I’ve read would all make useful reading for your non-blog-reading colleagues/managers. I’m thinking they’d be good to pass to a busy manager, to give them a brief idea of what you’re talking about when you discuss these technologies.

The books:

 
Phil Bradley: How to use Web 2.0 in Your Library
Meredith Farkas: Social Software in Libraries
Michael Casey and Laura Savastinuk: Library 2.0
Susan Gibbons: The Academic Library and the Net Gen Student
The first three do a good job of summarising the state of play in the sort of subjects that the authors write about on their blogs. I found the third gave an interesting and clear summary of the authors’ model of Library 2.0, but I felt like I wanted more detail on how to do some of the things suggested.

Susan Gibbons has a fascinating book to write about ‘Net Gen’ students, but this isn’t it, unfortunately. Her library took the innovative step of hiring an anthropologist to study studetnt behavior, and inform planning. A book-length write-up of that project would have been incredibly interesting. What we have instead is a very good initial chapter which discusses the characteristics of ‘Net Gen’ students, followed by several more which discuss gaming, blogs, wikis, folksonomies etc - and unfortunately present little evidence that ‘Net Gen’ students specifically are using these technologies (the gaming chapter cites research from 2001, showing the average age of gamers as 26, which would make those gamers Gen X, not Net Gen).

I do want to stress that I found the first couple of chapters to be highly worth reading (Gibbons is making me want to read Howe and Strauss’s work, whereas I’d previously been turned off even by their supporters). I also liked the way Gibbons stressed that her arguments applied to American college-age library users only; too often there’s a tendency for American writers** to talk about “libraries” when they really mean “some American libraries” - not all of us worldwide are in the exact same situation.

So, if you’re reading this, my recommendations? Have a quick read through either Phil Bradley’s or Meredith Farkas’s book (or maybe both). Don’t read it word for word, but pick out the websites and the software and the examples and use them to inform your own work. Hand the book to your less tech-oriented colleagues for a more in-depth read. Read the first couple of chapters of the other two books, they contain a lot of food for thought.

For the authors? I’d love to see the sequels to these books, with advanced tips and tricks, and with lots of examples and case studies of libraries who’ve successfully implemented these technologies.

I’d also love to see more bloggers writing about the books they’ve read.

*I was amused to see that one book, quite by chance, had included text from this very blog - Phil Bradley’s illustration of a blog was a screenshot of The Shifted Librarian’s homepage, on which Jenny Levine was quoting me.

**Not necessarily the writers I’ve mentioned here.

Following on from my last post, I’ll point to some of the different reactions to John Blyberg’s post on the debasement of Library 2.0.

Annoyed Librarian has the sort of post you’d expect, full of talk of bandwagons and twopointopians. It’s worth a read, including the comments. I’d say it is especially worth a read if you think you will disagree with AL.  Why? Well, we know that groupthink is bad. Only listening to people who are already inclined to share your point of view is a way to make bad decisions. That’s incredibly well documented in the psychological literature. For those with a more contemporary focus, it’s also mentioned in The Wisdom of Crowds. Having more information improves decision making.

Secondly, it’s worth reading the comments. It’s clear that many of AL’s readers see Library 2.0 as a technology focused movement, maybe even as the victim of hype/technolust. That’s not how Library 2.0 advocates see themselves or the movement (LibraryCrunch). But plainly, the message they are trying to convey hasn’t got through to AL’s readers. “We” (meaning all of us) don’t all know what Library 2.0 is. I’d love to see more people reading posts from the other side of the discussion.

I’m going to run out of time here, so I’ll just link to some thoughtful follow-ups to Blyberg’s post: they respond to each other, so read them in order:

• Meredith Farkas;
• Walt Crawford;
• Phil Bradley;
• Walt Crawford (again)

The posts also provide support for my argument that “we” don’t have a clear definition of Library 2.0 - they approach the topic from quite different perspectives.

John Blyberg argues that Library 2.0 has been debased by (some) librarians and by vendors looking for a quick technology fix. This is really one of the best posts (and comments threads) that I’ve read in a long time. Really. Go read.

John’s post has sparked some intelligent reactions across the biblioblogosphere, which I’ll be noting in this and a few subsequent posts. I want to break my response up, because I think John makes a number of excellent points.

Firstly, I think John deserves enormous credit for the following:

How and where we interface with our users is where the rubber meets the road and should merit a little more thought then simply thrusting a MySpace page in their face or building a new library in Second Life–a service our users overwhelmingly do not use and, which seems to me, like a creepy post-apocalyptic wasteland. I’ll even turn the tables on myself and admit that I was wrong about local tagging in the OPAC. SOPAC was by-and-large a success, but its use of user-contributed tags is a failure.

How many of us are willing to admit, publicly, that a widely-lauded initiative that we introduced, is “a failure” (even partially)? Not many, I’d imagine. Well said, John.

I’d like to suggest that John hasn’t really failed though - what he’s done is found a method that hasn’t worked (or hasn’t worked yet, or didn’t work in his particular case). That’s a good thing! Now he (and we) know that we need to try something different. The original idea was good (IMHO), but the execution failed, because (John suggests) a small group of taggers, with an interest in one particular area (manga) contributed most of the tags. There weren’t enough tags contributed by readers with other interests.

OK, how can we react to this? One way might be to increase the number of people providing tags. How can we do that? Easy - aggregate data from LibraryThing or WorldCat or Amazon, all of which contain user contributed tags (though not always good ones - the first example shows tags used to make a political point, the second that some of the most frequently-used tags on the last Harry Potter were things like “Harry Potter” and “Deathly Hollows”).

Thanks to John, we’ve discovered that a single library system might not have enough users who care about tagging to build a meaningful collection of tags. Now we know that, we can try a different approach.