Collaboration using new media isn’t just what we have always done, only faster. It is different.
For librarians, this affects how we can collaborate with each other, but also our role in archiving and retrieving content.
OUR OWN COLLABORATION
We can form consensus and influence each other as ideas are being formed. The truly joint effort continues further in the collaboration process than before. The formal co-ordination and “getting a first draft” role, which was generally performed by just one person, can be done by many people working together simultaneously.
If you look at the work involved creating a report, for example, the stages are pretty much:
- Work out what will be said
- Say it
- Review, tweak, edit, add citations
- Publish it
When librarians who couldn’t get face to face collaborated in the past, the collaboration usually happened at the “Work out what will be said” stage and the “Review, tweak,edit,add citations” stage. The “say it” bit often happened in isolation – with someone writing up something for others to review. There may have been a bit of bouncing back and forth during the writing, but generally it was done in isolation.
With tools like wikis, twitter and Seesmic, the collaboration happens also at the “say it” stage. For example, I’ve been watching a (rather silly but fun) discussion of slogans for the Library Society of the World. The conversation is moving from the Meebo chat room, through twitter and on to the wiki. There is a lot of “working out what will be said” work going on. Should someone want to rise above the frippery and turn it into something more formal, much more of the “say it” work is already done.
We also get to see each other’s raw ideas much earlier. I used to look at conference papers if I wanted to see the most recent professional thinking – as they tended to be more recent than journal articles. Now I look to blogs for liveblogging of library events, slides from presentations and ideas that are germinating. Twitter, meebo etc, gives me access to much more immediate professional thinking (and a lot of fun noise also, of course).
TRACKING IT
New media collaboration will also affect our ability to archive and retrieve important information for others.
Two things to think about:
1. The assasination of Benizar Bhutto was reported on Twitter far earlier than it reached the mainstream media. As Dennis Howlett points out at ZDNet, communication like this will have the ability to influence world markets in the future, as news of disasters, political unrest or corporate crises spread much faster than we are used to. Benazir Bhutto assassinated: Twitter’s utility
2. Seesmic takes it up a notch. This is more or less twitter using webcams. It is currently in alpha testing. Like twitter only makes sense when you are using it with friends. Basically people make teeny tiny videos, often in response to previous videos, that all patch together in real time to form a conversation. Other video sources can be fed in, for example YouTube clips…so right now there are quite a few excerpts from news broadcasts talking about the Bhutto assassination.
If you do not have a seesmic account, then you can still see individual videos, although not the responses or the context. Here’s an example I made before Christmas, Watching seesmic evolve .
Twitter, being text-based, can be searched via keywords. Conversations on seesmic often have just a video title, with little clue to the content. It will probably have tags as the service evolves. Although sometimes semi-private, this is still a form of publishing…how do libraries handle something like this?