A question to Rachel and I about my FASTER IM piece in CIL: Hello Rachel and Michael, Thanks a lot for the fine IM FASTER article. If you have a second, I’d like to ask one question. You state, “Your work flow won’t suffer at all if you incorporate an IM application on one of your reference area computers; IM simply becomes part of the reference staff duties… The AskSJCPL service is staffed by the same librarians who work the telephone and public reference desk.” You refer to computers and librarians, plural. The majority of the time our reference desk […]
Categories Social Media
337 posts
http://flagrantdisregard.com/flickr/profile.php (Via Download Squad
cool way to promote their IM service Originally uploaded by February 28. Darren Chase posts an ingenious idea: using the desktop to promote IM! Thanks Darren!
An Abramism via a recent email: “Blocking MySpace teaches kids as many good searching and internet safety skills as banning roads does teaching kids road crossing safety.” Stephen Abram Well said!
Brian Kenney has a wonderful editorial in the June SLJ on DOPA: Yes, here we go again. A “quick fix” that we’re not asking for, which won’t work, and which subverts the real purpose of schools and libraries: educating young people. No matter where you come down on the whole MySpace-in-libraries debate, do you really want your library locked in a “technobubble,” cut off from the evolving Internet?
http://www.wpl.ca/ I talk about WPL a lot because they are doing some cool stuff… Take a look at the Flickr section of their front page. It links to their collection of sets. This not only allows the librarians to organize, tag and receive comments on their photos, but it also educates users: this might be some folks first experience with Flickr. It’s a Web-based teaching moment! Other experienced Flickr folks might click through and add WPL as a contact. In fact, maybe the next step is a link in that box something like this: Add the Waterloo Public Library to […]
http://theubiquitouslibrarian.typepad.com/the_ubiquitous_librarian/2006/06/the_place_where.html The Ubiquitous Librarian points out that some students identify the library as the “place where fun comes to die” via Facebook. The wonderful thing is he doesn’t cluck and hurumph, he prposes turning such things around: It could be interesting to surprise a group like this one day with pizza or sodas or a coupon for a free coffee from the library café. Catch them off guard. Provide a seemingly random unique experience. And more than anything, create positive grassroots PR for the Library. Are you thinking this way? Are you checking out Facebook and MySpace to see what […]
http://www.flickr.com/photos/westmontlibrary/176505152/ Update: Michelle points out they’ve linked from their front page to Flickr! Is this the first instance we’ve seen of this? I think it just may be. Update 2: Oops! Aaron Schmidt informs me that the Thomas Ford Library pages has had a “pictures” link that takes folks to the TFML Flickr page for some time. Update 3: David King IMs to tell me that Bloomington PL has a link at the top of their new pages called Gallery, that links into the many sets put up by the librarians! HOT! And wowza but their pages are nice!
http://chimprawk.blogspot.com/2006/06/social-networking-five-sites-you-need.html Fred Stutzman, Phd student at UNC Chapel Hill, posts on social sites, including this bit of wisdom: Social networking for the sake of social networking just doesn’t cut it. Put simply, we want more from SNS-enabled sites than association. If we’re going to invest our time into a SNS site, make it worth our while. Make it a game, make it entertaining, make it useful – but don’t expect us to come if you think its enough to browse our friends profiles. I like Facebook etc BUT I am enamored of Flickr and LastFM. These sites let me do […]
David Warlick posts: MySpace now has 72 million users. That is larger than the populations of 213 countries. Perhaps we could deal with the social online networks thing if we thought of it for what it is — MyNation. This is their digital nation. They are citizens, and they’ve never been taught digital civics. (see the post for notes) Might librarians also be thinking about teaching digital civics? I think so!