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Lee LeBlanc on online vs offline education: “What I’m tired of is hearing outdated opinions about how horrible all online education is.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.

The National Library of NZ has launched Publications NZ, an online union catalogue of NZ material held in NZ libraries. It’s got a reasonably attractive interface and (yes!) allows users to create RSS feeds of searches. On the negative side, it’s limited to published material (so no theses), the list of the libraries that hold a given item is hard to navigate (why limit it to a small scrolling box?) and it only includes NZ material.

It’s great that users will find it easier to locate this material, but how often will they be searching solely for NZ material? We’ve already got the National Bibliographic Database, which allows subscribers to see any item held in any library in NZ; why not just expand that to the general public? I’m confused as to why we need a separate database, with less content than the NBD (albeit a much nicer interface).

Adults ‘encroach upon young people’s turf online‘, and aren’t necessarily welcome on sites like FaceBook and MySpace; and what happens when one’s different worlds collide in these networks (both Techdirt). The latter is something I’ve mentioned here before recently.

Social networking for law librarians (LLRX)

A virtual bookshelf for new books (The Shifted Librarian)

How to promote databases at your library (BlogJunction).

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.

I’m somewhat late here, but these are worth reading if you missed them…

Meredith Farkas links to a couple of interesting posts on libraries in social networks, by Kate Sheehan and Andrea Mercado: both argue that librarians often don’t understand the cultural context of social networks, even if they understand the technology.

Librarian in Black’s Top Tech Trends for 2008 (the presentation from ALA also blogged by Lauren Pressley).

Also via Librarian In Black, Trailfire, basically a tool for people to create pathfinders to websites on a particular topic.

The Library of Congress is now making its images available via Flickr, enabling users to contribute additional information about the images (The Shifted Librarian; librarian.net).

Michaels Casey and Stephens on how a transparent library should cope with anonymous online criticism.

Micheal Stephens links to a Read/Write Web article on 10 common objections to social media - with answers.

The Google Generation may not be so good at Googling, after all (via LibraryStuff). Some food for thought here for libraries (the article discusses a report (PDF) sponsored by the British Library and JISC).

Sarah Houghton-Jan links to a University of Michigan survey (PDF) that found “76% [of respondents] would not respond to a library presence on Facebook or MySpace, either because existing methods of contact were sufficient or because these tools are social networks and not places for library invaders. ”

Bearing in mind that this is just one survey, and that what is true for these students may not be true for others, does this mean we should abandon social networking sites? Not in my opinion, nor in Sarah’s, it seems (she comments that the 17% who would welcome a library presence in these sites is actually quite a high number, and I think she’s right). However, it does indicate that we may have set our sights too high in terms of the benefits of using these sites, and that ‘going where our users are’ may not be sufficient to get users using our services, if our users don’t want us in that particular space. I also wonder if the 17% might mostly be students who would use the library anyway, whether they used the print collection or databases, websites, whatever.

Something Sarah touched on is that Facebook and Myspace are social networks. Well, we knew that, right? But what does that actually mean? I’m currently reading Meredith Farkas’ Social software in libraries. She points out that social networks are mainly used as a means for users to develop and display their identity*. Another obvious  use is as a way of staying in touch with friends. Users aren’t necessarily using these sites to solve problems or find information, they are using them for social purposes. It makes sense, therefore, that many users might not find library applications interesting or relevant.

And, of course, libraries are most emphatically not cool, which may just make some users reluctant to become our friends, or fans.

That’s not to say we shouldn’t be there. The cost of maintaining a social networking profile would seem to be fairly low, and if it results in even a small benefit, it’s probably worthwhile. My current thinking is that it might be most useful as a way for librarians (not libraries) to build relationships with students (and faculty?) in their subject areas. Most of the postgraduate class, and a number of undergraduates, know me by name or face. By “friending” them, I would give them an easy and unobtrusive way to keep updated with what was going on in the library (new databases, etc) - or even just to let them know that I was going to lunch (and save them a fruitless walk from the computer labs to the reference desk, looking for me).

Of course, that’s me speaking as a reference/liaison librarian, and I should probably remember that there’s more to an academic library than just what I do. But from my perspective, at the moment, that approach seems most useful.

On the same topic, Michael Stephens reports on a library who advertised on Facebook - $10 worth of advertising brought them 15 fans. That may not seem like a lot, but at less than a dollar per person, it does seem reasonably effective - and perhaps there will be a snowball effect, as those people’s friends will see that they have become fans, and might also be influenced to do so.

Finally, Sarah mentioned a while ago that teenagers are better able to manage their online privacy than we might expect (citing the Pew survey I mentioned a few posts ago).  I will put in a caveat here - possibly teenagers think they are managing their privacy correctly, but aren’t? Recently there was a thread on a bulletin board that I’m a member of, where some quite tech-savvy people (and me) realised that their Facebook privacy settings were completely wrong, and that instead of their profiles being restricted to friends only, they were open to anyone in their networks. I wonder if the Pew teens are really protecting their privacy as well as they think they are?**

*Quoting from memory, I may have to edit this later….
** Of course, maybe it’s just old people like me who don’t know how to work the FB privacy controls….

A number of posts relating to Facebook have caught my eye recently - possibly because Facebook is the first generic social networking site that I actually use regularly myself. Possibly because my library is considering some sort of presence on Facebook.

Libraries in Facebook

Regarding the idea of promoting library services in Facebook, the Guardian reports on a study of student perceptions of academic use of social networking, stating that “Students really do want to keep their lives separate. They don’t want to be always available to their lecturers or bombarded with academic information.” The issue is also discussed on the Open University blog. (The Guardian article also presents the other side of the story, and the OU suggests some ways to use social networking sites in ways that are respectful of student needs and wants).

I’m not sure what the answer is here. Some of us, who work in front-line reference roles and do a lot of teaching, have a reasonably close relationship with our users. So possibly we could build a one-to-one relationship with them using Facebook (etc) - obviously giving them the option to friend us (or not). Possibly giving out our Facebook details at the start of the year, along with our email and phone numbers? Of course, this would mean ignoring the possible benefits of having an institutional profile.

I guess the worst that can happen is that we create and promote Facebook services, and the students ignore them. Which isn’t too bad, really….

General issues with Facebook

Cory Doctorow argues that Facebook will sink under the weight of socially obligated “friendships”. The problem with any social networking service, Doctorow argues, is that it is hard to refuse friendship invitations. Users then end up with too many friends that they don’t really want. This results, I guess, in a signal-noise problem - updates and notices from unwanted friends swamp those from real friends. Too, overlapping social and work worlds can be a recipe for disaster (I have workmates on my friends list, I’d rather they didn’t read the expletive-laden comments that some of my non-work friends post).

I’m not sure what the answer is - maybe I need to make better use of the ‘limited profile’ option within Facebook? (But then there’s the issue of offending people by only offering them access to my limited profile…..).

Cory also discusses privacy problems in Facebook. Tim Lee at Techdirt points out the irritating way in which Facebook applications intrude on a user’s friends. This is my biggest grumble with the site - if I add an application, it automatically tries to invite my friends to install it. Some applications require considerable effort to opt-out. This isn’t user-friendly.

Phil Bradley discusses the British Library in Facebook.

Not just about Facebook, but Michael Stephens explains that the way to get “reluctant adopters” interested in a technology is to show them how it can benefit them in their personal life, and then let them generalise that skill or tool into their professional life. This seems sensible - I’m sure we can all point to a tech-reluctant colleague who discovered the benefits of Skype when a family member moved overseas.

In another post, Michael discusses a proposed ‘Bill of Rights’ for users of the social web, and asks how it might affect librarians building online social spaces. Seems to me that it’s something that would apply more to library/non-profit groups than to Facebook, MySpace etc: I really can’t see sites like FB and MS, which have business models based around a walled-garden approach, letting users export their data outside the site. But I could be wrong.

Can social bookmarking improve web search? (via Phil Bradley).

Journal of Computer Mediated-Communication: Special Issue: Social Networking Sites.  (via BoingBoing).

This month’s issue of Computers in Libraries has a couple of good articles on social software, too - one by Michael Stephens on setting up a social network via Facebook or Ning, and another on using a wiki to support a quick reference guide, by Tim Ribaric.

Via Phil Bradley, this article from the New York Times

Facebook began selling ads that display people’s profile photos next to commercial messages that are shown to their friends about items they purchased or registered an opinion about.

For example, going forward, a Facebook user who rents a movie on Blockbuster.com will be asked if he would like to have his movie choice broadcast out to all his friends on Facebook. And those friends would have no choice but to receive that movie message, along with an ad from Blockbuster.

Like Phil, this seems like a bad idea to me. As he says:

I don’t actually think it’s going to work that well - I have several groups of friends on FB - some of them are work colleagues, some are friends from science fiction conventions and others are friends from different places. This is NOT a homogeneous grouping of people. Sure, some may be interested in some of the things I like to read or buy, but not all of them will.

It’s also going to work the other way around as well - if friends start pumping adverts through to me… I’m still going to get the spam… and they’re not going to stay my friend for long.

Including brands in FB is fine; there’s been some interesting discussion about creating library ‘brands’ (on TameTheWeb, among other places). Something that lets an individual connect with brands or organisations that they like? Fantastic. A way for people to discover others with the same interest, all voluntarily. But something that imposes those connections on that user’s friends? Not so great. Seems like a good idea with a less than ideal implementation.

There’s also a final question: are these brands who they say they are? Which one is the real Manchester United? (sorry Phil, no Everton).