Final Reflection
Well, this is the last blog post – a reflection on the course – and I’ll structure it around some of the questions Amanda gave us.
Has your view of social software changed since starting this course? If so, how?
Absolutely. On a simple level, I certainly know more about it and that is a good thing. I think a lot of librarians (and people in general) are quick to dismiss social software tools without really understanding them. I think you really need to engage with something before you can pass judgement and this course has allowed me to do that. I said something similar in my blog for my Digital History course and – to quote myself – “I am, by nature, a late adopter or maybe even what the Roger’s Innovation Adoption Curve calls a “laggard”. I still don’t own a cell phone or a laptop. Though I love photography, I didn’t start shooting digital until about 2 years ago (now I wouldn’t go back if you paid me). My first inclination isn’t to grab the newest technology out there; the real, personal benefits of a new technology have to be demonstrated to me before I will get onboard. But as John Unsworth has said ‘it is… important to engage with the new, if you are going to effectively produce, analyze, or even object to it’”. What was great about this class is that it allowed us to play with the technology and just as importantly – think about it in a library context. Yes, this or that social software tool is interesting or exciting but will it work in a library? Amanda referred to this poster above on her own blog and I love its sentiment (and its bold graphic statement, too) and think it especially needs to be applied to new technologies. If you click on the image, it will take you to The Usable Library (a site created by Aaron Schmidt and Amanda)
Of all the social tools we’ve reviewed this term, what are your “favourite” tools for libraries and why? What would you consider to be the low-hanging fruit, i.e. the tools that could be implemented easily and with the greatest impact?
I thought “Yes, I think I’m going to use that” about two tools: Facebook and Twitter. Now these were both tools I have a little experience with, but I had not looked at them from a library perspective. In the case of Facebook, I’m not inclined to use it on an institutional level (although I could be convinced) but an individual level. Facebook is where undergraduates spend a huge amount of their time and I think allowing myself to be contacted on there (not actively friending students, but being open to connecting with them) is a great idea.
I did my major project in this class on Twitter and academic libraries. I’ve already apologized to Amanda for how long my paper got, but that was because I found it so interesting I just couldn’t stop exploring. I looked, first, at how academic libraries are using Twitter and then I did a test study to see if I thought Western could use the tool to connect with its users. I was thinking of posting the essay online, but it got so long I thought I’d just summarize what I found here.
I read the tweets from 32 academic libraries over the period January 1 to March 31 of this year. Most academic libraries are using Twitter to push out information – and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Yale Science Libraries (@yalescilib), which never sent an @ tweet to anyone, has over 2,000 followers, so they are clearly pushing out what people think is interesting information. But I was curious to find libraries that were really connecting with their users and potentially even doing reference work online. Only about a third of my completely non-scientific sample were doing so. I emailed those libraries and very generously all but two emailed me back and answered my questions about how they build community on Twitter. The simple answer: they work on it. They have the philosophy that web 2.0 tools are for conversations and they try to foster conversations with users (mostly undergraduates) by sending tweets directed at them, following them and their conversations and jumping when they can help and even answering reference questions through Twitter. One of my favourite examples was a student asking for information from a series of other ‘people’ on Twitter – three were his friends and one was the library (@pollaklibrary). I just loved this example because it seemed to demonstrate that the library’s efforts to put on a human face and be seen as a friendly, approachable source of information had succeeded.
Then I took a look at Western. Through a number of means, I found 47 users of Western Libraries who were actively tweeting in the period of January 1 to March 31 of this year and I read all their tweets. What I found was that there would have been opportunity to engage with students by responding to suggestions/complaints, comments about the library and tweets that would have allowed the library to refer students to resources or services. There were no opportunities for real reference, but I believe that if the library spent some time building community they would find that students would approach them through this medium for ready reference and maybe even research help.
How has the distance ed. experience been for you?
It’s been great. I especially liked Amanda’s introductory video and weekly slideshows. One of the dangers in an online course is that no one in the class (let alone the prof) seems real and present and through that introductory video and her weekly slideshows, Amanda made herself real and present to us. In another distance course I took, the professor had us meet over two Fridays and two Saturdays on campus, which was fine for me, but some people who were out on co-op had to drive from Ottawa to London twice. I know the prof did it to make us feel more real to each other (and it worked) but it sort of defeated the purpose of a distance course. To my mind, there is nothing that beats a seminar-style classroom experience, but I think this course (which sidestepped agonizingly painful systems like WebCT) is probably the gold standard for distance courses.
I’d like to thank Amanda for a great learning experience which challenged my assumptions and encouraged me to develop my thinking about social software tools in libraries.