Social Media and the Library

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Use of Social Media at 3 different secondary schools across the world.  

	Castilleja	Brisbane Grammar School	Goldenview
Pinterest		✔
Facebook	✔		✔
Twitter		✔
Flickr	✔
Goodreads		✔
LibraryThing		✔
Blog	✔	✔	✔
Delicious		✔	✔  *
Diigo	✔	✔	✔
RSS	✔	✔	✔
Spineout		✔
Goodreading		✔
Vimeo
Bookcrossing		✔
TOTAL	5	11	5

* Link marked Delicious but leads to Diigo.

Web 2.0 is about participation, it is dynamic rather than static in nature. Users are contributors.   Johnson and Valenza (2009) insist that we maintain an online presence, as our future relevance depends upon it.   I’d we don’t keep up, we will be left behind and our users will find other ways to fill their information needs.  As a user, when I want to know something, I do go to google and look for it, and increasingly, Facebook pops up in the search results.  Some pages are well done and worth having, others hugely frustrating, and better off not being there with the lack of helpful information given.  As an example of a truly useless page that had me gnashing my teeth in frustration here is the Penrith Panthers Fireworks for New year page).  It could have been great.  New Years Eve, it had even less information than is on there now, almost a month later.  A Facebook page that is not updated, or a blog with infrequent posts are not going to engage patrons (Crawford, 2008), and become a tool that frustrates users rather than being useful. 

Facebook is primarily seen as a tool for connecting socially, so where does the library Facebook page fit into that culture?  And education in general?  With 1.01 billion users in September 2012 (figure from Yahoo Finance, 2012), it is clear that Facebook is an important social media tool that has potential to impact education for students over 13.

Goldenview Middle School have created a lively page, and in 2012, made 112 posts. There are a significantly higher number of comments and likes, and the library staff are responsive to their community.  Questions do not remain unanswered for long.  Goldenview understand the culture of Facebook.  Their posts are relevant, yet interesting and varied.  It is not just a list of announcements –there are pictures and videos linked, some humorous, interspersed with announcements.  The librarian also uses it to have conversations about online safety issues.

Used well, social media can make the library feel more personalized, and the connection is in a form that is already very familiar to most patrons.  Blogs fall into this category also, and increasingly, schools are using blogs as a way of connecting.

BGS have used a lot of tools to engage their community, and perhaps have taken on too many things, as there is little participation evident in the form of comments on blogs.  When only 10% of a community are active participants, while the other 90% watch, using more than one or two social media tools will be unsuccessful at engaging patrons in discussion. 

Using multiple applications that have the same purpose is not a good use of time, and the effort of keeping each one up to date is unlikely to be worthwhile as far as community benefit (Harvey, 2009).  The same can be said of using more than one social bookmarking application, which allow users to save articles and websites to one place (DesRoches, 2007).  If two are used, it is no longer simple.

When considering how patrons will contact the library, it is unnecessary and potentially damaging to provide more than a couple of options, as it increases the likelihood that messages will be overlooked (Harvey, 2009).  The patron who feels ignored, is not happy, and an unhappy community member has a wide scope for expressing their dissatisfaction.  Customer response must be fast, positive and consistent

Crawford, W (2008), Libraries and the Social Web.  Cites & Insights: Crawford at Large, Volume 8, Number 11.  Retrieved on January 15, 2013 from http://citesandinsights.info/v8i11b.htm.

DesRoches, D. (2007). All Together Now: Social Bookmarking Offers a New Way to Store and Share Web Sites. School Library Journal, 53(1), 33.  Retrieved on January 18, 2013 from http://ezproxy.csu.edu.au/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eric&AN=EJ755104&si

Harvey, M.  (2009).  What does it mean to be a science librarian 2.0?  Retrieved on January 1, 2013 from http://www.istl.org/09-summer/article2.html

Valenza, J and Johnson, D (2009).  Things that keep us up at night.  School library Journal, v 55, no 10 pp28 -32.  Retrieved on January 14, 2013 from http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/article/CA6699357.html

Yahoo Finance (2012) Number of active Facebook users over the years.   Retrieved on January 17, 2013 from http://finance.yahoo.com/news/number-active-users-facebook-over-years-214600186--finance.html

 Castilleja Girls School (USA)   http://library.castilleja.org/category/recent

Brisbane Grammar School (Australia)  http://libguides.brisbanegrammar.com/libraryhome

Goldenview Middle School Library Anchorage (USA) http://goldenviewlibrary.blogspot.com.au/

OLJ Using Delicious

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I had already setup a Delicious account for ETL 401.  Set it up, but made poor use of it.  In fact, no use at all.  I found it confusing and clunky, and not at all intuitive.  I’m not enormously technically mindful, but I’m not an idiot either.

So I approached Delicious with a fair amount of skepticism about its potential usefulness to me.  I also had to set up a new account, because I am trying to make my librarian persona online consistent, so use a different pseudonym than I do for forums or game playing.  This is library me on Delicious (https://delicious.com/jelmoy).

Even as the course draws to a close, and I reflect on my learning, I don’t think I have discovered or used delicious in a way that realizes its potential as a networking tool.  I have used it though, to help me organize my research for assignment 2 – and have used tagging reasonably effectively, that I am able to locate the things I need.  At the end of assignment 2, I was not faced with the monumental task of gathering together all of my resources and writing them into a list of references, I kept on top of that as I went along, and even managed to keep them reasonably alphabetical.  Any reference that slipped through the net without a URL was easily located from my delicious bookmarks.  This was a huge improvement on my previously haphazard and highly stressful approach to referencing. 

I also used Delicious to check what others had labeled inf506, and that yielded some gems as far as assignment writing too.

My other heavily used labels are for teaching resources.  Even if I don’t have my own laptop with me, using Delicious means that those bookmarks are available to me wherever there is a computer, or even from my phone. 

I feel that there is much more I could do from a networking point of view than I have currently managed, and from feeling very dubious about the worth of delicious, I am much more positive. 

Earlier in the semester I wrote that I was bad at tagging, but I have forced myself to do it, and I’m pleased with the result. 

In a school environment, it could be used in a way that allowed students access to their teachers bookmarks, it could be used for staff to share ideas and resources.  The advantages are obvious - information is easily accessible from anywhere (home or school), it is organised and it is not going to get lost.

Assignment 2 and all the discoveries I made along the way

I was overwhelmed at the beginning of assignment 2, and unsure of how I was going to proceed.  I don't have a school community I am attached to that I could create a project, so I knew it had to be a case study, but what to choose??

Then I read What does it mean to be a science librarian 2.0?, and it gave me my theme, can we overload our websites and our community with too many tools.

I've learned such an enormous amount in the writing of this assignment, and although my original expectations weren't born out by my research (ie, the school that I expected to have made a hash of using too many web2.0 tools didn't have many at all, it was links that was their issue, and terrible website design), I did happily choose a school that used too many things, another which had a very successful blog, and yet another that has a lively Facebook page.  All very helpful for writing my assignment and arguing that doing one or two things well was preferable to doing many things superficially.

One of the most important things about moderating a successful Facebook page is understanding the cultureof Facebook.  Because it does have a culture, and people are not interested in a library that just sits on Facebook and does nothing.  The librarian (or whoever does the maintenance) needs to engage with the community, by responding, and by posting in a way that is compatible with the way FB is used by most people.  That is what Goldenview Middle School do well.  The posts are a mix of funny pictures, announcements, responses to queries, and all the things you would find on a friends Facebook page.  The librarians also slip in stuff about keeping safe online and the way Facebook itself works - many students didn't activate any privacy settings at all. As Facebook grows, it's use in education will no doubt expand.  People understand it, they use it for their own social networks, it is not a big jump to use it to keep in touch with your school community.  As long as you don't set yourself up as something unapproachable and dull.

I have also had a rekindled enthusiasm for GoodReads this session.  This could be because being summer holidays I have read a fair number of books this January.  I like to read the reviews others put up, though I'm hard to please, I don't want to necessarily love all the really popular 5 star books, I don't have a lot of faith in the general publics discernment (Fifty Shades of Grey anyone?), but I also get put off by bad reviews.  I think GoodReads has huge potential for school libraries, but I haven't seen it utilised well so far.

After initially being a complainer about the Facebook page we have used instead of the university forums, I have come around.  An afternoon ferreting out the whys and wherefores of Book Crossing with a fellow student and I was hooked.  Interestingly there hasn't been the frantic panic of last semesters pre assignment rush as details were confirmed and re confirmed, and hysteria expressed and patted down.  Not sure why it has been different.  I still think that there are a lot of people who sit and watch and don't participate, but that is also born out by research - the figures are that 10% participate, and 90% just watch.  it has probably been slightly higher than that on our forum but not much.

eBooks and Libraries

I've only recently discovered Overdrive, and the role it plays in ebooks and libraries, and I was initially thrilled by those discoveries.  Bear in mind, I am not a librarian yet, I am still waiting for my opportunity, and building up a great swathe of ideas that I will use when that moment arrives.  So it was mostly as a kindle owner, that the discovery of Overdrive was pretty thrilling.  I love having a library in my handbag that I can dip into for whatever mood is upon me.  I have a long list of old favourites, and a longer list of TO READ books in a special folder (there are currently 48 waiting to be read).

Then today I read This blog, and feel like I've been cheated. That it will all change and be taken away from me before I can get into it.   Publishers seem to be deliberately making the access of digital content expensive and complicated.  The idea of allowing a library to purchase the rights to lending a book only 26 times before it expires seems like madness.  It already irritates me that having bought digital books, if I decide I don't like them, I can't recoup any of the cost of purchase by selling them on to someone else who might enjoy them, but I only buy books I expect to really love, and always try a sample of the book before I hand over any money, and they are generally not too expensive.  I won't pay more than $12, that is my rule.  More than that, I just don't bother. 

One of the comments on the blog also surprised me, as it relayed something I didn't know - that books I've bought for my kindle aren't actually mine, I am just "allowed to read it," potentially, they could take it back off me.  That seems wrong.  I've done the right thing by paying for the book - when there are ways to circumvent the necessity for this, but they could take it off me if I buy it from amazon?  Is this true?  What incentive does that give me for doing the right thing? 

If this is the way things are going to be, libraries won't be interested/able to maintain a digital collection because it will become financially unsustainable.  It seems a shame.