Week 12 Social Networks

MySpace certainly has a great capacity for increasing client interaction. The Childrens and youth Services librarian at our library has introduced a MySpace site onto our library homepage to "promote the wonderful resources and activities that our library provides to young people in our area". Kids can blog onto the web site and our librarians have introduced themselves as "friends".The site is used as well to promote reading, as some of the kids have written book reviews.

Denver Public Library in the US has a great MySpace site for teens on its web page: http://www.myspace.com/denver_evolver

This site could act as a model to any library wishing to market its services to teens by using a site which they are comfortable and familiiar with. The site offers links to online activities such as blogs and chat sites, "Find a good book", "Ask a librarian", "Homework help" as well as abundant resources on many types of teen entertainment etc.

A good journal article to read on MySpace for teens:
http://www.oclc.org/nextspace/007/advocacy.htm

I could also see this working in the same way for other library groups which want to promote their activities and network with others, for example Book Clubs, Family History groups, the Bubba Time and Storytime parents etc., in fact anyone who wants to network.

Of course a whole library can have a MySpace site as well. I guess the advantage of MySpace over the usual library web site is it is less formal, and can include a lot of eclectic material, such as podcasts and videos, and is very intractive, giving the library and its clients opportunities to network and communicate in an informal and sociable way. This gives libraries th opportunity to "turn customers into a resource for innovation".

PS According to our those in the know, Bebo is more popular with the teens in our library area. It looks like fun!

Online applications and tools.

So much to learn and remember this week. I created a document in Google Docs and practised editing it etc. It seems to be a bit of a rough tool, but good for sharing information and ideas, if not formatting. I could not download a document from Publisher to Google Docs - had to convert it to Word - and the document looks different in Google Docs. For libraries it would help to create documents in a collaborative way:

• newsletters
• interbranch communication
• editing documents between meetings of library groups
• cheatsheets
• brainstorming

I''m sure all the other free online productivity tools would be very useful - creating PDF files at home etc.

My mashup

I guess Mashups would be particularly useful for local studies photos and oral histories. The widget feature - showing changing photos of library activities/facilities would enhance the library web site - make it more exciting to view! Probably lots more things you could do - just need to think of them.