del.icio.us

Five social software sites that libraries shouldn’t ignore

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Here are the slides from my plenary session at the “Library of the Future” forum for the Learning Resources Network Services Network, hosted by Challenger TAFE here in Fremantle – Five Social Software Sites that Libraries Shouldn’t Ignore.

The presentation used a lot of pictures of monkeys to look at:

1. Why should libraries care about social software?

2. What is social software?

3. Massive content sharing sites

4. Five sites and:

  • The “so what” of the site
  • Usage
  • Sites with a similar purpose

5. Sites covered:

6. Not in so much detail, but libraries should know about

7. Information storage and retrieval is via social elements, not controlled vocabulary

8. Social does not mean trivial

9. Social elements

Used Adventures of Superlibrarian clip on YouTube as an example

  • Profiles
  • Subscribing
  • Friends/contacts
  • Internal messages
  • Groups
  • Tagging
  • Rating
  • Favouriting
  • Commenting
  • Related items
  • Responses
  • Remixing

10. How libraries are using these sites – two examples of each, but extra slides with more examples at end of slideshow.

YouTube

Flickr

del.icio.us

Facebook

11. Checklist for action

  • Ensure reasonable public access to these sites in your library
  • Ensure your staff know how to search content on these sites
  • Check your library’s web presence
  • Use social software to collaborate and have conversations……with other librarians about where libraries fit in this space

12. Finally, when considering social software and your library, remember that it’s not all about what suits US, but what suits our USERS.

Two clever libraries

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Two quick links to clever libraries, gleaned via the fantastic State Library of Queensland unconference yesterday.

QUT Creative Industries subject guide now includes a del.icio.us tag cloud. Not only that, they have incorporated a link to this in Blackboard, the Uni’s Learning Management System. Took two weeks from conception to implementation and a great example of fine service created without overthinking it to death via committee beforehand.

Yarra Plenty Regional Library have incorporated into their catalogue subject headings from popular “catalogue and share your own book collection” site, LibraryThing.

Check them out. If you want to see what we talked about at the unconference , visit the unconference wiki and click on the Topic numbers on the left hand side menu. I think they are being updated over the next week.

OPML and the Internet Librarian conference

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OPML is widely used to group a whole lot of RSS feeds into one bundle, ready for importing into an RSS aggregator.

I just imported my first OPML file into RSS Reader. I tried at Bloglines , but it said it would take 2 hours to import, and I was just too impatient. Bloglines has been a bit flakey recently, anyhow, with outages and delayed updates.

You could use OPML to provide “starter feeds” for people setting up RSS. You could provide information from a subject search, especially if the client wanted to know relevant resources rather than information. The grazr box on Peta‘s sidebar at Innovate is another use of OPML. To create OPML files, you can use a site like OPML Workstation.

What was in my bundle? Feeds associated with the Internet Librarian 2006 conference held 23 -26 October in Monterey, California. Over 1000 delegates attended and it had sessions like videocasting with David Lee King, RSS feeds and javascript with Meredith Farkas and mashups with John Blyberg. Here’s the full program.

The OPML file was created by Nicole Engard at What I Learned Today .The goodies she packed in were feeds for :

  • del.icio.us tags IL06 and IL2006
  • technorati tags IL06 and IL2006
  • flickr photos tagged IL06 or IL2006
  • conference wiki at pbwiki
  • conference organiser’s blog

This week has been quiet in my “library techie” folder at bloglines. Last week it was full of detailed notes from the conference sessions. If I want to follow up any, I can look at posts from 23-26 October in blogs on this list of people blogging the conf. It was compiled by Jennifer at Life as I know it .

TODAY’S HIPPIE CARD: New beginning

Imported from the earlier version of my blog that used Blogger. Commenter’s email and URLS will not show up.