I went to a day-long conference on this very topic last Friday: OCLC Capcon's Annual Meeting 2007: Social Networking: Fad, Folly, or the Future. Aside from providing very good food they also provided a variety of speakers on 2.0 technologies and how the library can participate and use these advances in Web technology. There was a presentation of the results from a new membership report Sharing, Privacy and Trust, and Our Networked World which can be downloaded or ordered in hardcopy from the OCLC website. The keynote speaker, Roy Tennant, Senior Program Officer for OCLC Programs and Research, addressed how we can "integrate the new social media tools, learn from those content streams, and deliver platforms that incorporate user-generated content." There was a panel of experts who discussed library use of the 2.0 technologies and even touched upon 3.0. There were some good tips on which libraries are doing what and it will be interesting to look at their sites. I also jotted down some web sites I didn't know about but want to explore. I have quite a stack of things to keep me busy.
The PowerPoint presentations of these speakers can be viewed and downloaded from the Capcon Website.
One thing I am sure of--this is not a fad, it will not go away, and libraries need to use these THINGS to stay relevant. They also are fun and can save a lot of time and effort. Allowing our users to interact with us and add to what we do via tagging and wikis can make our users feel more invested in our services.
One speaker, Roy Balleste, Director of the Law Library at UDC, had a list of questions we should ask ourselves when we considered using a new application--
Can it help the library?
Can it help the staff?
Can it help the customers?
He said you must get the staff doing it if you want to create evangelists. Thats what this 23 things is all about, huh?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment