David Cumming's LIS9763 Blog

My work for this course over the past thirteen weeks has allowed me to follow news stories on social media tools, and it is clear that social media is having more of an impact on how people and organizations interact with each other. It is also clear that social media is evolving very quickly, and libraries must be quick to adapt to the new social media tools and trends.

Choosing one social media tool as a favourite for libraries is difficult, because I think the best social media strategy for libraries is one that uses many social media tools, and tries new ones as they emerge. Tools like delicious are particularly beneficial for libraries, as libraries can use their professional abilities to organize relevant information links. However, I think that twitter is becoming more and more important, and I admire the personal voices librarians are using with this tool. I know it is kind of a cop-out answer, but I think all the social media tools discussed in this course could be beneficial in some capacity for libraries. However, libraries have to make sure they are implementing these tools that make sense for their library services. Inevitably, the users will decide if one tool is better than another by using or avoiding connecting to the library through the tools.

As for this course in terms of being a distance course, it worked for me, but I am now use to distance courses. I could see how someone who wants to be physically engaged in topics would not like distance courses, but I think this course is logically better off being a distance/digital course. The reading materials were good, but obviously the subject is so fluid the readings probably need to be revamped every few semesters anyways. I liked the variety of formats for the readings (blogs, Shirkley video, etc) and wealth of case studies.

Finally, this is my last post not only for this course, but is also my do al submission in the Western LIS program. I just want to say what an honour and privilege it has been to experience this program with all of you. I have met some of the brightest and warmest people in this program, and I feel incredibly fortunate to have been in this program. To all the students, professors and staff at UWO, a sincere thank you is in order. I wish you all the best of luck going forward, and hope to come across you all soon.

Warmest regards,

David J. Cumming

Good Morning,

I am going to use my second and final break for this week, but will be back for next week’s wrap-up.

DJC

Creating a social media policy is an exceptionally important topic for any organization using social media in any sort of  authoritative way. We have spoken in previous weeks about how one great trait of social media is the personal element of those who distribute information. However, an organization would be wise to have some sort of a policy in place with a properly defined scope to make sure (a) those you are trying to reach with social media tools know there is some consistency and (b) social media is not used in any inappropriate ways.

As always, there are examples in the news about this right now. I’m sure some you have heard of the viral video of the Cookie monster taking a break from cookies and spoofing Saturday Night Live skits. Well, last week, someone clicked the “Share on Twitter” button for this video. The problem is the person who wanted to share it on Twitter was logged into the Official British Columbia RCMP Twitter account. This account was set up to inform citizens of official RCMP business, amber alerts, police emergency notifications, etc., so the thousands of followers were a little confused when the official feed “liked” the Cookie Monster video.  (read the CTV news article here) Needless to say, this has left the RCMP to fend off criticism from the community about surfing the internet on the job, and it will probably leave some employee who had too much time on his or her hands at the station fired (or at best ridiculed for life by other officers).

While this seems relatively harmless, it is yet another lesson that social media becomes the face of an organization, and everything that emerges from social media from authoritative sources are expected to be professional. We have to be careful so that we do not have a social media equivalent of the Ronald Reagan radio blunder, where the then-President said something along the lines of “Attention, Americans, we are going to war with the USSR, we start bombing in ten minutes” jokingly, not knowing that he was in fact on live radio.

I am also not a “policy person”, but some policies which fall on the side of common sense are good just to define the scope of any social media strategy. For librarians, who should disdain limiting any information, I think that there are some policies that just make sense without over-limiting the information, and the WCLS Policy outlines some of these in great detail. However, it is one thing to implement a policy for organization social media tools, but another to create a policy for employees using their own social media resources. Professional sports organizations are disciplining their employees for using social media, the most recent example being an extremely popular twitter user and hockey player Paul Bissonette. Bissonette plays for the Phoenix Coyotes, a team that has an attendance shortage on a nightly basis. After a game on hallowe’en this year, he tweeted “Glad the fans came dressed up as empty chairs for hallowe’en tonight.” The team owner took offense, and began lobbying other owners to create a social media policy.

Now, we might be tempted to say that is just one (or many) immature athletes, and librarians would not be so questionable. But librarians are not immune to 2.0 controversy. Just yesterday, there was a story in Toronto’s trashy rag about a librarian from Ryerson who’s office was across the street from a strip club roof. He took pictures of strippers taking breaks on the roof and posted them to his Flickr account, which a popular blog reposted. It was essentially his own Flickr page, and he may have even posted the pics on his own time, but should Ryerson Libraries have a policy that could have presented this?? In my opinion, no, personal accounts should not be regulated by organizations, but this is definately an issue that will become larger as more controversies emerge. I would LOVE to hear your guys’ thoughts on this case or on regulating personal accounts by organizations!

Assessing social media is a significantly important for organizations, particularly informaiton based organizations such as libraries. For many of us who fight for social media policies at our organization might not be as objective as we would like because we are championing these projects, objective assessment of the implementation is critical.

One brief note on site analytics, I was looking around at different analytic systems, and one (I think it is Woopra or Clicktale) has videos of exactly how users have used the site. It shows ALL of the users’ cursor movements, and allows the Web master to start a conversation with any ip address they see on the site, so you can monitor visitor movements live, and if you see them stuck anywhere start chatting with them! I just thought that was really neat.

A small confession regarding this week’s topic, particularly Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds: While I am a huge news-junkie, and frequently search for the most up-to-date informationand stories, I have never been a passionate user of RSS feeds. Having seen the RSS icon on many pages long before the icons of today’s mainstream social media platforms made their way onto similar pages, I thought that it was just me who did not find RSS feeds desirable sources for information consumption. I understood the benefits of having an RSS aggregator for sites that are frequently updated, or to keep track of hundreds of sites and information sources, just did not rapidly adapt to using them for my information. After doing the readings for this week that relate to RSS and checking out some of the case studies, I decided to gage the use of RSS among my colleagues, friends and family to see if it was, in fact, just me. When asked “What do you think of RSS feeds?” or “Do you use RSS feed?”, it is astonishing how many people I talked to did not immediately know what they were. Expanding the acronym did not help at all, again suggesting the name does not exactly grab users. However, once I explained “The little orange icon thingie that looks like a quarter-target or autotorium,” they usually then knew what I was talking about. For these people, they did not use RSS mostly because they did not really know how to use them to aggregate sources. They also were not the type that regularly sought out complex, frequently updating information, which might explain why they never got the hang of RSS. Of those who did know of and use RSS feeds, none were really persuasive that people not using RSS were missing out on something. For these people, they started using RSS feeds for certain sites and blogs they liked, and it just grew on them. Surprisingly, I found the older computer-savy people I talked to were more likely to use RSS feeds than yonger people. This poll, of course, is far from scientific, but the results nevertheless surprised me. If anyone has similar experiences, please share them! There is no doubt that RSS feeds could help a lot of people who are unaware of how to use them, and I think this is an area where librarians should step up and assist patrons who may find significant benefits in using RSS feeds.

The potential of mobile ubiquity is just now being unleashed, and as “smart” mobile devices become more affordable and with better specs, it seems these “all in one” devices will be used more and more to consume and distribute information. For the purposes of this week’s blog, I attempted to do all of the course work from a mobile device.

One reason why Canada lags behind dozens of countries in terms of mobile penetration is the laughable rates of data plans set forth by the “big three” (Rogers, Bell, Telus) telecommunication cartels. Unlike other countries with relatively affordable and often unlimited data plans available, the Big three throttle data after you reach a certain limit, and usually the only plans that make economical sense max out at 500 megs. Between the course Vimeo video this week, the course readings, opening the case studies, and browsing headlines while procrastinating, I used about 25 megs, or 5% of my monthly allotment. While some may say this is plenty, and it is easy to budget that much data, there are still limits to how much information we can transmit via mobile platforms, especially if the telecom cartels continue the trend of limiting, throttling,  or pricing information seekers out of data. Therefore, libraries should be cautious of data limits when designing mobile web services, and keep them as simple as possible.

Those  of us in librarian advocacy roles should be applying pressure to telecommunication giants to (a) make data as affordable ad possible, and (b) apply pressure for them to expand their networks across the rural and less populous areas of the country so that they are not excluded from these new information resources. After all, those in remote locations could benefit the most from these tools.

Cloud computing is definitely the near future of computing, the private sector is quickly learning how beneficial it can be for both productivity and cost-savings, and libraries would be foolish not to follow suit. I think our generation really started cloud computing years ago before the 2.0 boom when we would e-mail essays and projects to ourselves when working on different computers (such as working on different library computers). Now that larger and larger pieces of information can be uploaded and transferred, including various types of media, the sky is the limit for cloud computing (corny pun intended).

However, cloud computing also leads to semantics regarding information ownership. Apple’s new venture into television “rentals” as well as Netflix’s relative success suggests that people want to consume information without actually owning it, but further blurs the lines on copyrighted materials. For the purposes of this class, I have looked at streaming videos such as Justin.tv and YouTube. On Justin, for example, people will stream sports or television shows that might be copyrighted. One may ask “How am I stealing something when I never actually own or possess anything?” On Justin there is chat with other viewers of the live streams. How is watching a sporting event there and talking with people different from going over to the broadcaster’s house, sitting on his or her couch and watching the game?

This will of course become a fundamental challenge for our profession as the new Copyright legislation, Bill C-32, might get passed into law later this year or early 2011. The bill would put the onus on libraries to limit the distribution of cloud computing materials or risk copyright lawsuits. Digital locks would trump the fair dealings provisions our profession has fought so hard for in cases like the CCH case. This would most likely place yet another burden on the evolution towards cloud computing, and librarians should apply even more pressure on our MPs to rethink C-32.

Anyways, sorry to rant so much, but I believe these two things are very much  central to the next big shift in information storage and distribution. On a side note, the City of Ottawa is having a contest to get mobile app developers to create municipal information-rich resources.

While I was a late-comer to micro-blogging I have found significant benefits to using Twitter as a source of information. I personally follow Canadian journalists, politicians and local bloggers to keep up with current events and news. As more and more people use it to spread information, it is quite easy to set up an account and have different authoritative sources sending information to you directly, and create sort of a mega-rss feed with a personal touch.

I have a current story about how my use of twitter has helped from a client service perspective. As some of you know, I am finishing a short-term contract working with people in charge of the Web site for the Parliament of Canada. While I was at lunch last week, I checked my personal twitter account for the news of the day. One Canadian journalist who is fairly prolific user of twitter randomly re-tweeted one of her friend’s messages. The message jokingly made reference to some of the documents our organization were putting out which referred to the Governor General as “Her Majesty the Governor General.” Of course, a few weeks ago that should have changed to “HIS Majesty the Governor General,” but since it had been “Her Majesty” since 1999, many of the documents which are posted every day have automatically been set to read “Her Majesty”. The journalist did not know who I was, but since I randomly followed her and happened to read that message on Twitter, I was able to immediately contact the people in charge of those documents to notify them of the error. The response I got back from the person after I notified them was that many other people had just brought that to their attention as well, making me think there are others in our organization who read the same tweet around the same time. Even without searching extensively, twitter can be pretty resourceful for real-time information.

The Kelly blog definitely provides great information about libraries can use twitter to promote our services, and I particularly liked how he describes how we can use twitter to advertise to the community. Catering to the interests of the community is an important part of any social media strategy for libraries, and actively examining local trends and participating in these real-time discussions will give libraries more of a leadership role as an online voice for community interests. A key component for libraries would be finding an employee who is the right type of personality to actively engage the community.

I am going to take my first “Blog Holiday” this week, but I did want to say that the area of this week’s slideshow which talk about the importance of authenticity was spot on. For many social media tools, it seems the one where there is more of an authentic, almost “off the record” voice are the most popular. Journalists seem to be focusing more and more at having individual social media personalities than on corporate ones, with both PostMedia News and CBC News Network pushing their journalists to converse with others via blogs and especially Twitter. With politicians, the ones who speak off-the-cuff in blogs (like London North’s Glen Pearson) or Twitter (like Tony Clement) are immensely more popular than others which just spew official talking points. Even when we are not physically interacting with people and instead doing so using virtual media, it seems we seek more personalized or humanized connections.  Anyways, see you in two weeks time.

Rather than focusing on whether folksonomies are better than traditional systems with controlled vocabulary, as done in the Lawley reading, we should look at how librarians can work to make the systems mutually beneficial. For me, there are three important roles librarians can fill when it comes to folksonomy.

The first is to attempt some sort of standardization where possible to the folksonomies. The ability to have any sort of slang or term is great, and will obviously widen the search paramaters of subjects. However, some sort of controlled vocabulary is also important and contributes to successful searches. Having professional standards and subjects is what made taxonomy systems work well, and as the course video this week concludes, the combination of the two systems is what leads to “findability gold.”  Librarians, then, should take the lead in attempting to apply some sort of controlled vocabulary or consistency in their own use of social media as supplemental tools to the free-for-all classification allowed with folksonomies.

Quintarelli brought up enterprise folksonomies, and these demonstrate the benefits and drawbacks of folksonomies within communities. They are great because workers can tag information using interoffice slang, terms and acronyms. However, some people are not very good at tagging, therefore the system works best if there is professional guidance. The ability for anyone to tag information is exciting and extremely beneficial. But it can benefit from a little professional oversight.

When I began searching around delicious for crowdsourcing, I found the ability to locate information on different events tremendously easy thanks to the collective tagging of other users. I thought of random subjects that one might be searching for, and tried to see what type of information would be available. I thought the particularly beneficial part of social bookmark tagging was not only the wealth of information provided for various subjects, but also the ability to see the timeline in which they were tagged. This data can be extremely beneficial sources of information. For example, a search of bedbugs shows a steady rise of tags over the decade, suggesting the problem, or at least reporting of the problem, might be growing. Using the collective intelligence and input of others, we can extract a wealth of information from important time periods. One can easily find bookmarks added just after Michael Jackson’s death, or from the moment Susan Boyle went viral by just looking for a spike. A search for “birdflu” shows the peak in late 2005-early 2006, and a search for “swineflu” shows a dramatic peak in 2009, allowing researchers to pinpoint the specific times when these were seen as important issues to other users.

But the system does not work that well for other subjects. A search for Sars does not show even a little bump, let alone a dramatic spike, in the late 2002-early 2003 time period when the epidemic shocked us. This is most likely because delicious was just beginning in this time period, and was not widely used. This demonstrates that collective tagging works well as long as people use and contribute to the resource, but the ability to use these resources to extract information is limited when it is not widely used.

Since I was looking for specific subjects with my researcher hat on, I thought it would be beneficial to tag current articles which demonstrate the exciting ways social media tools are helping us search information. One particularly interesting article was about a data miner who used photos of whales uploaded on Flickr to track the 6,000 mile migration of a whale. Another bookmark shows how the British Library is struggling to address the historical value of social media, while another explains how social media is shaping how we search for information. While some of the links go back to articles from earlier in the year, most deal with current issues in social media and how social media is affecting information.

The Flickr account is dcumming, and is available here.

http://www.delicious.com/dcumming

Librarians and information professionals have been given a real gift with the use of tagging tools. Following the readings, brief course discussion, and a look around at some of my colleagues’ blogs, there are many ways in which the use of tagging is more beneficial to those searching for information than our tradtionally developed subject headings. As the Pew Research numbers show, tagging is done relatively equally among genders, ethnicities, and those under 50, suggesting there may be less of a bias in tagging than there was in traditional classification schemes. The unbridled potential of tagging is well documented, but as another reading noted, tagging can only succeed insofar as information users have a vested interest in tagging. In order to continue the positive experience tagging has given to the organization of information, we need to make it less tedious for users to become involved, and demonstrate the benefits of it for real time information searches.

Library using Tagging Tools

The case studies demonstrate very well some of the easy ways traditional libraries can use tagging software. Catalogues with the ability to tag documents seems to be the most direct connection to tagging from traditional library services, and having a library use things like Flickr are good ways for libraries to use tags to enhance the community. However, one important area that I believe librarians need to address is the organization of tags themselves. With the universal ability to tag information online using these tools, there can be several variances of tags for the same subjects. For example, one journalist at the House of Commons started using the tag “hw”, which stands for “Hill Watch” to links about what is going on in the House of Commons. However, there are already several dozen tags loosely related to this, “cdnpoli”, “HoC”, “parliament” etc. Some documents have one tag, but not others, usually for arbitrary reasons. While some tags are logical (like the slideshow example of “Paris”), but other tags have great varience. Therefore, I believe it is our jobs as librarians to know how people are using tags, and how to at least attempt to standardize tags for certain information to prevent information from being fragmented. Do you think we should lead this charge?