Web 2.0...The Machine is us/ing us

Ning-a-ling

Ok, so perhaps it's blaspheming but I just can't get into the MySpace thing. AHHHH. I know, how can the technolywood librarian say this?! Such social networking is the cornerstone of what we nuevo technolibrarians are doing here! To which I say I am FOR social networking but I am still sort of skeeved by MySpace. Maybe I just hang with a rough crowd online I'm not sure. But my point is, for those who are ALSO a tad skeeved by MySpace there is another way! It's the ning way!

I started to discuss ning in my last post but got a little side-tracked by the uber-exciting walkie-talkie widget. Ning is a lovely peaceful little place on the web where you can create a social network all your own. Libraries have discovered this one and for good reason. When you create a ning you are creating a place where patrons can gather, create their own personal pages, post their own pictures and videos, create their own groups and start discussions all safely and happily under the Public Library banner you've created.

However, I'm seeing a trend here and that is an invite only craze, wherein these library sites are requiring potential users to request an invitation in order to become a member of their network...I suppose this serves to keep the riff-raff out, who, I can only imagine, must be trolling the internet in droves making trouble for library websites. But I say share and share alike when it comes to creative discourse in the library world! Especially since the creator has the ability to monitor posts and delete those that do not follow the rules of decency. While I understand the fear that the intrusion of skeeve can instill, I always like to err on the side of openness over exclusiveness.

So, for an example of how a ning can work, I'll point you to the one in which I am a newly minted member, Library 2.0. I signed up, uploaded my picture, and became a member of this network with my own little page to modify as I like. I can choose a theme and add blog posts and invite other friends to view what I've got going on. What I REALLY love is that when I comment while on other pages in the network or in discussion forums, my comments are sorted nicely back on my personal page along with any replies so that I can keep up with my online communications. Techcrunch has a nice review of the service here with lots of nice screenshots.

I expect to see many more libraries using this service in the future but I hope to see them a little more opened up...

Walkie Talkie over the Internet w/YackPack Widget!

Today's post was going to be all about these fun things called ning's...

["Ning is the only online service where you can create, customize, and share your own Social Network for free in seconds."]

....but, like a little baby distracted by shiny things, I got SO excited about this new widget that I encountered while perusing library ning's that ning's will just have to wait!......

YackPack is a new widget that allows you to walkie talkie over the internet! I discovered it when I stumbled upon Library 2.0's ning. There is no software required, no installation of anything, no registration. All a person has to do is click on the button and depending on how it's set up you can either record and send a message OR talk live with the LiveVoice feature.

This is a nice little video that'll tell you ALL about it. Love it.

Twitter Madness

So the Wall Street Journal had an article in today's paper regarding networks using twitter as a marketing tool for their shows. (I'd link to it but WSJ makes you get a subscription to view articles the morning after and I won't subject you to the rejection.)

If you've perhaps heard of twitter but have no idea what it actually is, watch David Free's short infovideo on the VERY fun BIGWIG SOCIAL SOFTWARE SHOWCASE wiki and he'll show you everything you need to do to get started. He calls it "a microblogging service where you can tell the world what you're doing at 140 characters or less", like this sentence length.

[yes, i spent a good five minutes counting that sentence out to exactly 140 characters...all for you.]

Or, put another way, it's sending a quick instant message out to all your 'friends' en masse. It came out in late 2006 and has been ever so slowly gaining steam in the library world as a way of getting library event announcements out to the 'yoots' and for taking reference questions. And while those are both interesting and nice uses of it as a tool, that's just not fun enough for me and, like the WSJ article discussed, you always run the risk of alienating users when using a social tool as a marketing device.

I think we've gotta be a little more fun & creative with this twitter stuff instead of hiijacking it and making it into just another IM device or another way to get a library rss feed out. The thing that makes it fun in the first place is that its supposed to be a stream of consciousness sort of outlet for the short random thoughts, commentary and experiences had throughout a day. Just look at the way pretty boy John Edwards uses it.....

So how about, at least for the teen demographic who are actually using it at the moment, handing it over to your teenage volunteers and library pages and letting them run wild with it. (I can hear shrieks all around!) Seriously though, a nice experiment might be to get your young page to send a few twitter notices throughout the day about what's going on at the library. Presumably a teen who chooses to work at a library really LIKES the library and presumably that teen would like to make everyone else think it's pretty cool so let them strike up that twitter madness in their own teen language.

The key is to use it as an open dialogue with the public, not just as a blanket news/marketing spam. Instead of just mindlessly and automatically throwing out announcements (which might be just fine eventually for a certain group of users) give the feed a persona and be fun and funny.
Ok fine, so you're afraid to have your teens run wild and you still want to market your goods...consider throwing out little bites from the reference desk like a funny world record that you found in your copy of the guinness book of world records and include a link to that books record in the catalog. Or maybe 'just found out the bible is the most shoplifted book ever! ha!' that sort of thing. The library is a place FULL of weird information that can be discovered. and that's fun.

Change.org Fundraising Widget for Libraries

I was reading my newest edition of Details Magazine and as always found one teeny little article of interest amongst the absurd.

[sidebar: yes I realize I'm one of maybe 10 subscribers to this magazine, as evidenced by one Julia Alexander, Brooklyn, NY who ALWAYS writes letters to the editor and always gets them published.]

Anyhow the article was entitled Angel Investing and discussed the trend of "angel" organizations on the internet bringing together a wide range of investors interested in taking a risk on a small business. Google was the recipient of one of these angel investments and that seemed to work out pretty well for everyone involved.

This got me thinking about how the internet can factor into investment in libraries, and specifically, how it can help my vision of an information commons in every public library...

Change.org is a platform that brings together a multitude of social cause groups in one space on the internet, making them easily searchable, and connecting like-minded people across the world to a specific cause. The platform recently added a new 'fundraising' widget that is essentially a nice clean 'donate here' button.

Example Widget:

The BEST thing is that this little donate widget can be added to Myspace pages, Facebook pages, individual websites, really, anywhere on the web! The possibilities are endless as these widgets are set free and non-profits hone their skills for marketing it. Even better, to establish an account costs nothing (instead a small service fee is taken out of all donations received) so for those tiny little branches out there they can now reach a bigger audience outside of their small insular community at no cost.

I haven't seen any libraries really use this space to its potential yet although some attempts seem to have been made and either forgotten or are still in progress. Or perhaps they haven't tagged their entries appropriately so that they can be found :-) Still, it's a fundraising avenue that should certainly be explored to its fullest because funding libraries IS a social cause just like any other.

"Hipper Crowd of Shushers"

The New York Times Sunday Edition had a nice little article about the new emerging library crowd in the Fashion & Styles section. "Today's librarians?", it asks, "Think high-tech party people".

Yes...yes that sounds about right...

I found the part about trying to guess the names of cocktails (based on book titles) by their dewey decimal no. TOTALLY geeky but shamelessly amusing and probably a good study technique I should try....

Amazon.com and the Library Catalog....so happy together

This is great. I first discovered that universities in the UK are using a script so that anyone on the university system, searching Amazon.com on their Firefox browser, will see a link indicating the status of the book they are searching for at the university library. They will be told whether or not its available, if it's available in electronic format, on loan, etc., and users can link right into the catalog from Amazon to reserve it.

Turns out its on this side of the pond too and a number of public libraries have put this into action. In fact our very own Loudon County Public Library System offers this download for its patrons, as well as the DC Public Library and the Mongtomery County System. (my own university library however hasn't done this...sigh)

How does it work? Well, luckily I have a super genius brother and he puts it this way:

"Greasemonkey is a plug-in for Firefox that lets you overlay additional content over an existing web page, usually using JavaScript. It's like scribbling on a page of newspaper."

This article with screen shots elaborates further on it: "A simple Talis script detects ISBNs on a page at Amazon and uses this to query a shared database of library holdings. Greasemonkey is then used to write information on libraries holding the book back onto the Amazon page (note the '@libraries' box, not normally evident in Amazon results)".

userscripts.org has a large collection of these library lookup scripts and in theory, creating a customized script for your own library can be as easy as modifying one such as Carrick Mundell's for the Seattle Public Library to reflect your own catalog details.

Where it begins....

Recently the world of librarianship was all a twitter about the ALA premiere of "The Hollywood Librarian", the first feature film dedicated to librarianship. Unfortunately, in the interest of full-disclosure here, I and my other librarian pals ended up missing the premiere. This was due, in large part, to my erroneously thinking that meeting for happy hour would be a good pre-movie event. Turns out that for a group of poor twenty-somethings, the ALA convention simply cannot compete with friday night beer specials. I fully expect my ALA membership to be revoked any minute.

In any case it turns out that we will not be able to see the movie now unless a local library decides to show the film for a fee. This of course defies many rules of logic, the most obvious being that the public library is here to serve those who don't have the pocket change to, say, support propaganda films about librarians. It would seem this marketing plan hasn't matured beyond the sort I devised as a child whereby I charged admission to family members to watch me being cute. My brother, incidentally, never bought it (even though I did a killer rendition of the Bangles' walk like an egyptian) and frankly neither will library patrons.

For a well-rounded commentary please see Norman Oder's review for the Library Journal, The Hollywood Librarian: Nice Idea, Jumbled Execution, Dubious Marketing Plan .

In it he mentions a comment by Karen Schneider who suggested that "a great librarian movie" would include "Jessamyn West installing Ubuntu."

And in that sentence this blog was born. I was delighted, amused, and informed by that video of a librarian who easily overcame the wee problem of having been donated computers (yay!) with no operating systems (BOO!)! It dawned on me that we all have a lot to share on the matter of new technology and its creative implementation in our libraries.

My thirst for exchanging ideas on this topic has no bounds and frankly I'm running out of time in class to raise my hand. SO I will continue to search for signs of clever implementation and uses of new technologies in our libraries and post them here. I also invite, nay urge, anyone who has their own story to share to write me!