Aaron Schmidt, Reference Librarian, Thomas Ford Memorial Library talked to the Education Institute today about using social computing tools. Here are some of Aaron’s highlights and comments.
Social software is all about people: connecting, collaborating & communicating. Since libraries are concerned with people as well as materials, these tools are important because withbut people libraries are nothing. The tools are simple to use, and fun. There are low barriers to entry, as using the tools requires low web savvy & most options and tools are free. Of course, there is staff time involved in learning and using the tools. However, since sharing & interacting in new and unique ways on the web really injects the web with humanness for your library community. You can put your resources where the users are, where are your communities are, making your library customer centric.
Sites to check out/tools to try
Flickr — photo sharing
del.icio.us — store & share bookmarks on the web
askmetafilter — questions & answers from an online community; reference in action
Last.fm — chart musical profile through a plug-in
MySpace
43Things — goal setting
Wikipedia — free encyclopedia with group contributions & edits
37Signals — collaboration software for personal networks
Commonalities of tools:
Folksonomies, which are different from taxonomies, are basically systems of metadata set up by users which are flat not hierarchical, and are created through use of tags/keywords. Tags highight the wisdom of the crowds and we librarians should definintely pay attention. In addition we are moving on the web from expertise to consensus where there is a collaborative effort using everyone’s knowledge to achieve a goal (43 things) or get an answer (Wikipedia).
Great Library Examples
MySpace – Hennepin County
Flickr – Colorado College, LaGrange Park, Library group
del.icio.us – Thomas Ford, LaGrange Park
weblogs – Ann Arbor, WS History, Bisson’s weblog OPAC
instant messaging – Libraries using IM Reference
wikis – Butler University WikiRef
podcasting – podcasting libraries