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.

Second Life and Education

Initially dubious about Second Life, I was excited about the use of a virtual environment used by Northern Beaches Christian School.  All of a sudden it made sense.  The immersion in the virtual world, the art gallery, and in particular the English class.

This is something I would like to pursue, because this is exciting.  From my observation of my own children, these are environments that they love.  It made me think of that pithy, but over used observation about discovering what you love and never having to work another day in your life.  The ultimate in learning through play.  Awesome.  I want to go to NBSC and spend time immersed in their worlds, learning about what they are doing, and working out how I can do it too.

The changing digital world

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Five Examples of shifts and how they impact on us as digital citizens

1. 

Newspaper circulation is down 7 million over the last 25 years.

But in the last 5 years, unique readers of online newspapers are up 30 million.

2.

abc, nbc and cbs get ten million unique visitors every month collectively and have been around collectively for 200 years.

Myspace, Youtube and Facebook get 250 million unique visitors every month, and didn’t exist 9 years ago (the video says 6, but it was made in 2009).

3.

95% of all music downloaded last year wasn’t paid for.

4.

93% of US adults own a mobile phone.

1/3 of them don’t feel safe using it for purchanses.

5.

In February 2008, John McCain raised 11 million dollars for his presidential campaign. 

Barack Obama attended no fundraisers, instead he used social media to raise 55 million dollars in that month.

Copyright Issues

I started thinking about copyright issues, and was interested to read in Dearney and Feather, that intellectual copyright exists both to protect the innovator, but also to encourage innovation.  When it is so easy to access newspapers and music and books and articles, are we going to lose our motivation to create unique works, to think our own thoughts?  When it is so easy to find out what other people think, when there is so much to read that has already been written, will we have time to think deeply enough to create new great things, or are we doomed to intellectual mediocrity now?  I’m thinking (in despair) of works like Fifty Shades of Grey - a badly written piece of fan fiction with a mass audience who are just lapping it up (if I can use the word lapping at this point without it seeming deliberately distasteful).

Policy needs to address issues of copyright, for all media platforms, words, music and photos/pictures.

Initially I was shocked by the claim that 95% of music downloaded wasn’t paid for.  Then I started thinking about how I got my own music in the 80’s – by borrowing and recording my own copy of friends tapes, which may or may not have been originals.  By recording music from the television or the radio.  The biggest difference is probably one of quality of recording.  The illegal mp3 is invariably going to be of higher quality than when you hoped the radio announcer wouldn’t talk too long over the beginning or end of your favourite track.

Digital Literacy

Social media has changed the way the world has until now operated.  The presidential campaign demonstrates that eloquently.  Those who refuse to engage in these technologies simply will not succeed over those who can harness them.  I know people who don’t use social media, who see it as irrelevant, who refuse to engage, some of them are only in their 30’s, and I wonder what will happen to them as the world keeps changing.  I’ve been dragged along in the wake of my husband, who is probably one of the worlds oldest digital natives, having grown up in a university environment with some of the earliest computers. I am constantly out of my depth, because he changes stuff all the time.

Mobile devices are where we are headed, and already the percentage of adults who have a phone is very very high.  I expect that as time goes on, and there are more adults who have grown up in this connected world, the ease with online purchasing will also increase.  It is going to become more and more essential that library websites have mobile versions, because this is how our users will be accessing our sites.

Online Safety

Online behavior will follow you in a way that the mistakes you made in high school don’t.  Helping students to realize that Facebook is not their diary, that online bullying is not acceptable, that posting photos of yourself in compromising situations is not good practice needs to be part of what we do.

There are so many ways you can put yourself online (youtbe, Facebook, MySpace etc), and there is a vulnerability in this.  The Jenkins whitepaper observed that young people often found that in putting content online for their friends, they sometimes attracted unwelcome attention from strangers.

When you can hide your identity, is there less restraint from behaving in an antisocial way?

Content Regulation

We must look at questions of responsibility for use, filters of content which may be inappropriate.  The internet is difficult to police, because of it’s vastness, and because it is an international entity, it allows access to unsavoury content, and whose responsibility is that? 

When there isn’t a set of ethical guidelines that contributors are expected to adhere to, how do we deal with that?

The Participation Gap and Online Privacy

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--> The Participation Gap

I was interested to read in the Jenkins whitepaper about US cities that plan to provide free wifi access to internet.  Free!  The reasoning is, that it will give families, who are at the limit of their financial resources access to connection, because if children in these families aren’t given the same access as their wealthier peers, then they will inevitably fall further behind.
I had an interesting conversation at the end of the term with a deputy at a school on the outskirts of Sydney.   The school is quite isolated (not of course in the same sense as a school in the far west of the state), and they will have to pay for connection to Ethernet cabling to cater for the students.  It will be expensive, but as they are planning to be a Bring Your Own Device school in the future, the correct hardware is essential.  It is not something that can be skimped on.  Other schools have tried to do it cheaply, and the result is that only a handful of students at a time can connect, the network slows to a crawl, and everyone is frustrated.  In my own home the cries of “stop downloading, your hogging all the bandwidth” are frequent, and that’s with only 6 of us, a whole school worth of users trying for access with an inadequate connection is unthinkable.

Access is not the end of the conversation though.  Getting connected has to be inextricably tied to education in the use of the available tools.  In fact, it is even more important.  Which makes sense.  So in our teaching, once our children are connected, they must be equipped to use the available tools.  We must be purposeful in our instruction, because, digital natives or not, these children need more than the device and the connection.  Just as most of them would not learn to read without explicit instruction, so they won’t automatically know how to access creative commons items to embed in their work, or why it is important that they do.


Thoughts on Online Privacy

We seem to be moving towards more transparency online, Facebook is intended to be conducted under your own name, and while there are those who do have multiple accounts, or use a pseudonym, I think they are in the minority.  Pearson says this is a good thing.  That anonymity loosens our restraint, and we are more likely to behave badly, when we think it won’t have a consequence in our real lives.  

I’ve seen that on forums.  There is a pack mentality sometimes, and it can be brutal.  One forum I belong to has 233 000 members.  Of course we won’t all think the same thing about every issue that is discussed.  For me, that’s ok, and if I see something that I don’t necessarily agree with, I won’t dive in and tell the person they are an idiot (I might, and sometimes do think it).  There are those however who call their unkindness honesty - and honesty is a good thing, right?  Hiding behind the screen, I have watched different posters pulverized by others.  And they are real people, vulnerable and deeply wounded by what are essentially attacks on them.  Just because you can’t see the crazies doesn’t make their criticism less hurtful.  I think that if we were forced to use our real names, a lot of this kind of thing would stop, that users would think twice, and not go on the attack. Anonymity confers a degree of false bravado, and opinions can be wielded with less restraint.

On the other hand, there have been so many dire warnings about not giving too much away online, not allowing some predatory type to “find” you in real life, it’s hard to know what the right course of action is.

The issue of facebook and privacy is apparently very important to young people, Raynes-Goldie says it ranks higher than acts of terrorism.  Which seems an extreme kind of comparison, but perhaps Facebook privacy is a more relatable issue, and one more likely to have an impact on them than a potential act of terror.

The relative newness of the technologies, and the social media sites means that as a society we haven’t developed the same kinds of rules of etiquette that constrain other behaviours, we are still finding out where the limits are.  Getting our students to consider these things is important.  Probably as time goes on, the expectations will become more defined, but now, when someone poses a “what do you think?” kind of question online, be it on a forum, a youtube video or a Facebook post, is it rude to say what you think?  Even if you don’t agree? Even if what you think is unfavourable and you can't express your opinion without being offensive?   Can we in text make our meaning clear enough, that we can respectfully disagree without being perceived as unkind? 

I had thought prior to reading the article on teachers befriending students on Facebook that the boundary had been well defined. Looking at NSW DEC policy, the recommendation is no, don’t befriend students.  Reading some of the policy in the article however, I can see how this line blurs, both when the wording becomes unclear, and when schools start adopting Facebook as a method of communication.  

The solution seems to be, while a student is at school, they shouldn’t be on your friend list.  Liking a school page however, is an acceptable compromise.


Pearson, J. (2009). Life as a dog: Personal identity and the internet. Meanjin, 68(2), 67-77. Retrieved from http://search.informit.com.au/fullText;dn=200906244;res=APAFT
Raynes-Goldie, K. (2010). Aliases, creeping, and wall cleaning: Understanding privacy in the age of Facebook, First Monday, 15(1), 4 January. Available http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2775/2432  
Harris, C. (2010). Friend me?: School policy may address friending students online, School Library Journal, 1 April. Available http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/article/CA6724235.html