Sandra Herber: Future Librarian

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.

This week’s readings were a real pleasure and came at just the right time.  Most of us are now in the dog days of the semester – that back-breaking, disappointing (because there is never enough time to get things done to the level you’d really like) slog until the end – and the readings this week were a reminder to keep your eye on the big picture, not only in graduate school, but in libraries, businesses and in life.

Thoughts on Cognitive Surplus from Clay Shirky

I love talks like Clay Shirky’s given at the Web 2.0 Expo in 2008.  Whether you agree with him or not, you have to admire his ability to synthesize examples into an overarching theory.  Shirky believes that since World War II we have come to live in a world of greater leisure time, but our addiction to television has been masking a huge cognitive surplus created by that leisure time.  This cognitive surplus can be accessed through a new type of media – that which includes the user in not only consumption, but production and sharing.  His ideas reflected many of the (then) new ideas that Amanda introduced us to early in the course, and it’s great to hear about it again now that we’ve had time to experience some of the tools that are making this happen.  Shirky’s examples were interesting, but I think I have even a better one.  Jane McGonigal’s article Why I Love Bees: A Case Study in Collective Intelligence Gaming is a fascinating study of what the collective can do when it’s motivated and it uses its free time to do something rather than just being a passive consumer of media output.  It’s a long article, but I guarantee that it’s not boring and you will be amazed at the process she describes.

Take Risks

Again, it might be the time of the semester (or the time of the degree – I will be finished my MLIS next Friday), but Kathy Sierra’s Death by Risk Aversion resonated with me on both a personal and professional level.  Those of us who are graduating are finding that there are very few entry-level jobs out there (at least in academic libraries as that’s where I am looking) and one of the possible stances to take in this kind of situation is to play it safe, but Sierra’s point that “if you’re not doing something that someone hates, it’s probably mediocre” was timely for me.  Playing it safe (following what everyone says you should do or trying to make yourself generically appealing to all employers) is a quick road to a job where you’ll find frustration and a lack of fit.  Taking a risk in this situation involves sitting tight, gathering new experiences (through volunteering or self-directed learning) and waiting for the job to come along where you know you can shine – where your skills will be put to work meeting needs.

The Market is Speaking

Though it was directed more at for-profit companies, Christopher Locke, Rick Levine, Doc Searles and David Weinberger’s article, 95 Theses of the Cluetrain Manifesto, has some vital information for libraries.  Their first point, that markets are conversations, of course reflects the growth of social software and the ability of the user to interact with, evaluate, compare and then tell everyone what they think of a company or product.  For my major project in this class I am looking at how academic libraries are using Twitter not just to push out information, but to connect with users.  A few libraries are doing just as Locke et al. suggest – “getting a sense of humour” and “sounding human” as they interact with users online.  This is a risky business, since users might not be comfortable with a kind of proactive (the negative term would be invasive) library presence on Twitter, but I have to admire these libraries for really trying.  They are taking risks and in at least one instance I found a student who included his university library among a list of people (the rest were his friends) he was asking for help, which means that the library, through dint of hard work and effort at making connections online is addressing point #85: “When we have questions we turn to each other for answers. If you didn’t have such a tight rein on “your people” maybe they’d be among the people we’d turn to.”

Reality

All the readings were hopeful and I feel optimistic at what can be done with some of these tools (I will outline my own social software toolbox next week in my reflection blog) but the reality is that many academic libraries are still very traditional.  Implementing some of these ideas may be a slower process than we all might hope but with a combination of sensitivity to the corporate culture and a little risk-taking, I think that our generation of academic librarians will be making huge positive changes in libraries.

I’m in the group responsible for this week’s project and I’ll be posting our prototype and site soon, but since I’ve engaged with these ideas (both through the readings and our project), I thought I would do a blog post this week as well.

In Hammond’s article Social Bookmarking Tools (I): A General Review it is pointed out that “to anyone familiar with top-down classification schemes, this approach [social bookmarking] could look like a fearful muddle.”  The “anyone familiar” are creators and users of traditional hierarchical classification systems – that is, us (librarians and librarians in training) among others.  Though I do see the benefits of social bookmarking, I am very aware of its drawbacks and I thoroughly believe that the hierarchical systems that we have been trained in are superior for giving access to bibliographic material (that’s why I wonder about the benefits of encouraging students to tag material in the new UWO catalogue).  But tagging and folksonomies are not being used to organize bibliographic materials (or at least they haven’t taken over from traditional classification systems) they are being used to ‘catalogue’ and ‘organize’ that great amorphous mass – the Internet.  The Internet cannot be catalogued by traditional means (I guess Yahoo tried that and look what happened to them when Google came along?).  The Internet has been created ad hoc and should be classified ad hoc.  But as Hammond says, “a free tagging approach to classification is a jumbled, hit-and-miss affair, and any system that it may throw up must be discovered, or learned, after the event” and that is where we are now: trying to understand the system that has been created.  The greatest benefit, to me, to this type of system is that it may tag material with the terms that users would actually use to find it – but as our group discovered, there are many, many ways to name the same concept.

I thought Rainie made an interesting point in Tagging: “some worry that folksonomies can be a type of ‘tyranny of the majority’, in which the prevalent group’s way of thinking about the world overwhelms the local and the quirky.”  This was interesting to me, since in the same article Rainie points out that taggers are mostly under age 40 with high levels of education and income.  They are the people determining what is noteworthy on the Internet and that is both good and bad.

I enjoyed Joshua Porter’s The Del.icio.us Lesson where he made the very good point that tagging works not because people do it for altruistic reasons, but because it will benefit them directly.  The network value only comes in when we aggregate what people have created.  Andrea Mercado, in Tagging on Flickr & del.icio.us, makes a similar point: “Flickr follows a ‘desire lines’ philosophy, letting people create their own metadata, laying paths where people are walking instead of trying to lay out paths and assuming people will follow them (like, say, structured classification)”.  This, I think, should be the strategy that we take when using social software tools in libraries.  We need to make sure that we aren’t laying out the paths and hoping that people will want to walk along them, but rather letting people create the paths because they see the use in them.  After they have done that we can find a way to create a network benefit from all their work.

I had never edited a wiki (let alone set one up or managed it as many people in this class seem to have done) until posting my book lists on the wiki Amanda set up for this course.  All the information in this week’s readings, therefore, was new and interesting to me.

While I understand that the main focus of a wiki is on collaborative work, I found some of the examples that used wikis in novel ways to be some of the most interesting.  For example Chad Boeninger’s Biz Wiki at Ohio University was a really useful site, though not technically a collaborative space, where he had leveraged the searchability and malleability of the wiki to keep his subject guides fresh.

Some of the wikis in the cases studies as well as the ones that came up in the readings were really well done and compelling.  One I liked personally was the Library Success Wiki (mentioned in Using Wikis to Create Online Communities).  What a great place to find vetted information on topics that are of importance to librarians!

A theme that came up (and I think will come up week after week, as it relates to social software in general) is letting go of control.  It’s clear that the person who creates and administers the wiki can control how much or whether people can contribute to it, and some have chosen to make their wikis less collaborative than others.  In a true wiki that lets everyone edit the work of everyone else (such as Wikipedia) rules seem to emerge as to what is acceptable and what is not, but I wonder if using a wiki in a work setting is as easy. I imagine that it must take some practice to get people to let go of the ownership of their work.  To me, this is one of the central issues in using social software.

Isn’t it funny how once you’ve heard a new word that you didn’t know before, you hear it over and over again?  This is what happened to me this week with foursquare.  When it was mentioned in our weekly chat, I had never heard of it.  Then a friend mentioned it to me on the weekend.  Today I saw a blog post about it.  Is foursquare useful for libraries?  Well  David Lee King thinks so.  Take a quick look at his post and see whether you agree.

I just read Rochelle Mazar’s article on “Libraries and Social Media” in the OLA Access magazine.  For those of you who get the magazine, you can have a read, but the article isn’t online at the OLA site.  The closest I can bring you to it is Mazar’s post on her blog which appears to be an early draft (or maybe parsed down version) of the article.

She has some interesting points.  She says that “I just haven’t seen any compelling reasons why libraries absolutely must use social media networks”.  That being said, she explains how her library (the University of Toronto Mississauga Library) is using Twitter to deliver announcements.  But that’s only the first step – their RSS parser then posts those feeds to the library website and they also go up on the library’s digital signage.  So – they are using Twitter as a tool to push out this information and they chose Twitter because it’s easy to syndicate and easy to use.  Interesting.  The librarians chose this tool because it served their purpose but, as Mazar admits, they have taken the interactivity out of the technology, thereby not really using it in the way others advocate it should be used.

Mazar also notes “that people over 25 make the best use of social media tools”, which I found interesting.  I had thought that as an academic librarian trying to engage undergraduates, social media would be the way – but maybe that isn’t where they are yet (or they don’t want to engage with social media technology except to keep in contact with their friends).

Finally, she believes that “social media’s current focus is on individuals with passions communicating with other individuals with passions” and because of that, it may not serve the needs of institutions.

Being so new to this discussion, I’m not sure what I think yet – I just found it interesting to find this point of view being presented by a woman who is an Emerging Technologies Librarian and a self-admitted fan of social media.