Social Networking Group Project: Cooking the Books!
Our group project, brought to you by Lola, Dorothy, Megan, and Dayna, evolved into “Cooking the Books”, a combined book club and cooking club, making use of Facebook and Ustream social networking software.
This program is combines cooking demos, a book club, and related group discussions that are primarily delivered via a Facebook group. Cooking the Books is a global group centered on food and cooking, and its contents may be viewed by both members and non-members of Facebook. According to social networking technology, the group allows for participants to engage in discussions, demos, events, and with each other through the site and across geographic boundaries. Cooking demonstrations take place at the library and may be attended by those who wish to watch in person; they are also streamed through a Ustream channel that allow for online participation in real time.
We felt that web broadcast was a creative way to draw an audience and also provide another way for the community to access and connect with the library and each other. The broadcast puts a ‘face’ on the library program and it allows audiences to participate or be passive attendants.
Ustream was a convenient (and free) software for live broadcast that also allowed a live chat session. Together with a webcam, a microphone, and an internet connection, Ustream.tv was an established service that provided all the functions necessary to broadcast and record a cooking demonstration and discussion session.
Combining the demonstration with a discussion is relatively simple but requires a good deal of preparation. Interaction with the audience would definitely require at least two hosts, one to complete the demonstration and one to monitor the computer session.
Ultimately, using a live broadcast is a different way to interact with the community. Combined with Facebook, it offers an alternative way to connect.
The Discussions area of the Facebook group is where participants may share thoughts, ideas, resources, and communicate about the book club’s book selection. The group also encourages that participants share their videos and pictures. Discussions and resources are managed according to topic, and events are managed chronologically by the events themselves. Pictures may be managed by albums or users may simply upload their pictures into the general picture repository.
Cooking the Books aims to deliver a library program with social media through the creation of an online space for the group. Book club discussions are scheduled to change every month with the selection of a new book; cooking demonstrations are also scheduled monthly with the selection of a new recipe. In order to harvest the ideas and discussions of the group, the book and recipe suggestions will be driven by participant suggestions.
The goal of the project is to reach an audience that stretches across gender, generational, and ethnic boundaries, an audience linked by love of good books and good food. The group would hopefully inspire users to make connections between food and literature, to make new friends, and ultimately, to see the library as a vibrant resource, connected to the social networking world in an active way.
March 4th, 2010 at 11:26 pm
Sounds like a great project! What did you find most interesting in completing this assignment?
March 5th, 2010 at 11:45 am
[...] week’s group project is up: check out this blog post for all the details. Thank you to Lola, Megan, Dorothy and Dayna for their work on this. Go check out their project and [...]
March 5th, 2010 at 11:55 am
[...] thought I should include links for our Facebook group, Cooking the Books and our group post that Dayna posted for us. I hope you all check out both links and enjoy the [...]
March 7th, 2010 at 7:37 am
You’ve designed a creative way to encourage a specific user group to coalesce around the library. The demonstration was nicely done. Although the production values in this kind of broadcast can’t compete with commercial television networks, this broadcast offers something much more personal: the opportunity to watch your local librarians trying out these recipes! It’s an excellent idea and if it was incorporated into the library’s programming budget it would be interesting to see how it would evolve and if the concept would spread to include an array of subjects.