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.

Podcasts & Video podcasts

I find the video podcasts more appealing than the audio podcasts - been spoilt by television. I loved listening to the children's stories. Reminded me of listening to the radio storytimes as a child. I can see that this technology would be very useful to libraries .... children's stories, author talks, library news, staff training. A video podcast would be a great way of training the staff to use our new Library management system when it arrives. Managed to put an RSS feed to the Denver Library podcasts on this blog. Never know how I do it - just follow my nose!!

Actually making a podcast seems daunting. Read Steps to Adding a new Podcast from the Library Success wiki - seemed very complicated!

Social searching

A bit confused about exactly how this might work, but I know some metropolitan libraries have Homework Help functions on their web sites, so I guess this is one way we could adopt the Answer Board idea. When our library installs its new, very up-to-date LMS, rating and reviewing of items by customers should be possible. There is a facility to enhance the functionality of the online catalogue so clients can create their own profile and I am fairly sure they would be able to add tags to the catalogue as well. Have to investigate this further.

LibraryThing

Have added LibraryThing to my blog without too much trouble. I prefer to use a traditional catalogue, but I can see how this would appeal to many readers. Good readers Advisory tool.

Del.icio.us and Technorati

Managed to open an account with delicious and the buttons are on my toolbar. Can see that delicious would be very handy for collating useful websites for Reference work. Having trouble linking del.icio.us to this blog.....

....have just read the end of Sharon Morris's notes. For future reference... on delicious website....Settings...Blogging...Link rolls....insert hyertext by pasting code into Layout....Insert page element.....html/Javascript.....works!!

You can choose what you want to appear on the blog page .... handy..

Tried searches on Technorati. Had same result searching "bookmobile" in basic and Advanced searches.

Tried nswpln2008 - found Flickr photos, but no blogs or posts. Then tried "Posts - tags only with any authority" and got 6 hits. Technorati is frustrating, preferred delicious.