Social networking sites

It is interesting to see that diverse groups are using Facebook, MySpace, BeBo and other such free tools to promote themselves and connect with clients and each other. I liked the map from LeMonde which showed graphically which countries prefer which sites. You need to be a member to add comments to communities like ALIA's Beyond the Hype 2008: Web 2.0. So there is some ability to prevent undesired elements accessing your site. Still, I wonder how you could protect yourself as a Facebook member from people who wanted to be your friend but who you didn't want to meet or make friends with. Also, I think that although social networking sites are free to set up they would require regular maintenance which would cost staff time. This is all new to me still and I'm sure I have a lot to find out about it.

The Coshocton Public Library's Animanga Club MySpace page has photos of teen members. I think such clubs could be a good use of social networking sites for a public library. However I'm not sure whether posting photos of minors on them would be against child protection legislation or whether it is a good practice. My library doesn't post publicize photos of minors.

The American Library Association's MySpace site has good promotional posters - I felt like downloading and printing them. The Rotorua Public Library's site had links to videos and photos of events. I think this could be a good way of promoting my library's events such as writer talks, and inviting comments from "friends". I was interested to read in the NewsGrist article that an artist became a "friend" of a museum's social networking site and it could help her promote her own artwork through a link to her site. (http://newsgrist.typepad.com/underbelly/2007/10/up-close-person.html)

The UK local government Communities of Practice site could be applicable in Australia. Such a site in Australian local government or Australian libraries could be useful if it targets a specific interest group, eg. local history.

I feel I have learnt a huge amount from the Library 2.0 course and am eager to explore applications I knew little or nothing about before I started it. Thank you to all Public Library Services team members for your helpful feedback during the course. Although I have reached the end of the course now I feel I have made a new professional beginning in discovering blogging and its applications.

Answer boards and social searching

On http://answerboards.wetpaint.com it is suggested that reference librarians "slam the boards" once a month. This seems to be a U.S. site and there seems to be a movement of librarians internationally who aim to do this. Many of the questions on WikiAnswers are vague and sometimes ungrammatical.
For one question in the "Exemplary answers" section of the "Answer Board Librarians Wiki", the best answer as chosen by voters was superficial. A librarian's answer, on the other hand, was thorough and helpful - it answered the question (how to get whiteout off a shirt) while the "chosen answer" sounded like an attempt to be smart (buy a new shirt). I'm not sure whether readers/askers always read the longer answers though. I think it may be easier to give face-to-face reference services where you can clarify what the asker means, than to try and understand a very vague question and answer it on an answer board.

Regarding a role for my library in slamming the boards: I think it is easier to justify answering reference enquiries if the enquirer is local or if the service can be directly linked to your source of funding. For example, in a public library, answering local history enquiries is clearly a service that comes under the banner of a local council. The same applies to collecting local history materials: they are less likely to be weeded than other library materials. Slamming the boards may be a good way librarians can promote their services. I wonder though, who is going to fund the librarians' time doing this? Will they work on the answers in their own time? Employers may not think it is a good use of staff time to answer questions from enquirers in another suburb or another country.

I think using taglines like "Libraries - because you NEED to KNOW" at the end of an answer boards answer, is a good way of promoting library services, especially as it appears that librarians' answers are often rated highly by answerboard users.

Customers of my library might like to add their reviews of our books or DVDs, if there was some link on the catalogue record that enabled them to do this. They also sometimes make suggestions for improvement of the service. A blog on the library website might enable them to do this online. The Council has a blog where they raise a topic periodically (e.g. parking, social isolation) and customers can add their comments about it.

Delicious, Technorati, LibraryThing

Hi again. Today I reran the Technorati searches on "bookmobile" and "nswpln2008". This time I found 11 blogs with "bookmobile" in them. I tried an advanced search for "nswpln2008" and clicked "find posts tagged" with that term. Although I didn't find any blogs when I selected the "blogs" tab, I found more than seven pages of photos tagged "nswpln2008" under the "photos" tab. Many were by the same person. Thanks for the tip.

Another useful thing I discovered today was the "language" field in the top right hand corner of the Blogger programme. I learnt how to select English as the language when the default language was Korean, at an internet cafe.

I am finding this course very interesting and hope to complete it by the end of the year. I wonder when it will be taken offline?


I will try to add a link to my LibraryThing account. It isn't working - there is a JavaScript error - I will try again later.


This is pmarydu's account on Delicious.

http://delicious.com/pmarydu/money

I tried to add this as a gadget on the right hand side of my blog but when I typed in the URL the system wouldn't accept it. I wonder if there is a way I can add it there with a Delicious icon.

For the Technorati searches this week, I tried as a keyword search and an advanced search and found 268 posts both times. They seemed to be in date order, newest first. Then I tried a "tag search" in advanced search. I got 39 posts.

I couldn't find any results for using any of these 3 methods. Can it be that nswpln2008 blogs are invisible to Technorati? or somehow private because they are training blogs?