Categories Social Media

337 posts

Posts about social media– how to use it, etc.

Some IM & Meebo Links

Dutch students protest via IM and text: http://www.smartmobs.com/2007/11/27/dutch-student-protests-organized-via-instant-messaging/ Dutch high school students have been “on strike” this week, protesting against extra school hours. Students spread word to join protests on Friday and Monday using online and mobile phone text messages. Meebo embedded in the library catalog: http://www.davidleeking.com/2007/11/30/fun-with-our-meebo-widget-and-the-library-catalog/ We added a Meebo widget to unsuccessful keyword searches in our library catalog. This way, when a customer searches our catalog and doesn’t find anything, they can contact us via IM and ask for help (we also display our phone number if they want to call). Hooray! This is exactly what we were […]

Patrons Participating

http://www.herzogbr.net/blog/?p=223 Brian Herzog writes: Earlier this year, my library uploaded to flickr a set of historical photographs taken around town in 1901. We thought it was a good way to make these library materials more accessible. I just noticed a comment on one of the photographs. A patron recognized another patron’s house, and forwarded him the link to our historical photograph. The second patron then uploaded a photograph of his house today to his flickr account, and linked the two together using comments. That’s great – that’s exactly how libraries can enrich their collections and communities. We didn’t really do […]

Facebook Changes (UPDATED)

Via the Facebook Blog and Nicole Engard: We noticed people wanted to connect with their favorite music, restaurants, and brands; but there was no good place for these types of affiliations to exist. Now, there is a place for them and you can become a fan of whatever pages you choose in order to interact with your passions in new ways. You can post reviews for a local restaurant, buy tickets to a new movie, or be the first to get a heads up about new promotions. Nicole asks the question: Does this include libraries? I know there was some […]

Focus on the Positive

Allow me to direct you to Rob Coers’ presentation from Internet Librarian International 2007: http://www.robcoers.nl/weblog-artikelen/internet-librarian-international-2007.html It’s a great, concise presentation with a list of five tips to get started with social tools lin libraries. I’m fond of the one above – Rob believes that 20% of employees are never going to be happy with innovation and change. He advocates on focusing on the other 80%, made up of early adoptors and followers. We riffed on the same topic at last ILI last year and I’m glad Rob is carrying his thinking forward. What do you think?

Cultivating Your Networks

I’ve been following Adam Levine’s speaking tour of Australia with much interest: http://cogdogroo.wordpress.com/ This recent post about a presentation seemed a bit familiar: I did have an unhappy participant in the front of the room. When I get to the section of the talk on “The Internet is Really Big”, it was the Technorati slide on growth of the blogosphere that put her in motion. Hand goes up: “What is blogging? Why does it matter to me?” I really the questions of interruption, but was hoping I did not have to explain what a blog was- a simple web creation […]

OCLC Report: FRL Executive Summary

Thanks Karen! While I wait for my hard copy to arrive, I really appreciated this post: http://freerangelibrarian.com/2007/10/24/oclcs-report-on-privacy-and-trust-the-nut-graf/ The general public respondents are more likely to have used a social networking or social media site (28%) than to have searched for or borrowed items from a library Web site (20%). [What! Is this report suggesting social networks might be more visible, available, and engaging than library catalogs?] The percentage of Internet users that have used a library Web site has decreased. Library Web site use declined from 30% of respondents in Canada, the U.K. and the U.S. in 2005 to 20% […]

A Calendar… A Quilt…

http://librarystream.wordpress.com/2007/10/18/marketing-a-vibrant-community-place/ Libraries are part of the communities they serve. They’re often a very active part — sometimes central to the daily life of community events, programming, and resources. So why not show that pulse? Why not display the vibrancy of daily life. One photo at a time might not mean too much, but look at the same sort of calendar quilt done for a library. Thanks Steve!

Another Way to Find Out What Story Your Library is Telling

http://www.davidleeking.com/2007/10/10/tracking-words-with-twitter/ working from library today – walk through downtown and the sound of commerce ringing clear Back in the stinking library. Listening to a preschool story group reciting “Diddle Diddle Dumpling My Son John” with a teddy bear at the library. Library has ALL of the Thin Man movies! Thin Man Marathon! (with cocktails!) “The library isn’t good for books” Wow. Gwan UCC! off to the library to get some intense work done before dreamweaver/CSS class this evening (mix in some Game database work on the side pls) Research at the UM Map library on consumer water usage in Israel […]

Trust & Talking It To Death

From Wearing Scarves Year Round: (emphasis mine) Yesterday, I walked into the brick wall that was the realization that many of the projects I want to work on at the Northern-most library I might not get to work on. It’s frustrating because I thought I would be able to get a lot of things off the ground and I got excited and invested in that, and then it turned out that the library’s promises of being interested in making themselves more 2.0 and integrating social networking services into their world was not on the level. They do seem to want […]