Category: socialseries

Flickr is a social photo sharing site and it has lots of uses for libraries and librarians. With Flickr, you can upload, do basic editing and share pictures in a multitude of ways. Flickr has several different uploading options, one of them a bit of software that you can install on your computer to make uploading pictures really easy. It also has a “basic uploader” that works on the Flickr webpage and requires no downloading or installation of programs. Once you’ve uploaded your images to Flickr, then you can do some basic editing (red-eye removal, cropping and some image manipulation with the included PicNik features), organize them into sets and/or collections (collections are pro – $$ – accounts only) and tag them until they make sense to you and will be easily re-findable. After you’ve done all that, you can then share them. Flickr has built-in “add to your blog” capabilities as well as a way to get a bit of HTML to add to a web page. It has badges and slideshows and unique URLs for each size of each picture you upload as well as for each set, collection and tag you use to organize your pictures. It was built to make sharing your images as easy as possible.
With all of that in mind, how can libraries use this tool? First, the pro account is $25 a year and gives you unlimited uploads and storage. Get it. Second, it’s a really great way to share pictures of your programs, events, book displays, staff members, parties and your building(s) in general. Once you upload those images, remember, they are really easy to then add to your website. One thing that people love is images of themselves. If you post some pictures of a recent event and some of the people pictured attending that event start emailing out links to your website, you’ve just created free, word-of-mouth, viral marketing. Also, those pictures are there for your publicity folks to use in future mailings, fliers and web announcements.
Other ways to use Flickr are:

• use your pictures to create inexpensive marketing materials (business cards, calendars, books, etc.)
• Use some of the thousands of 3rd party applications to make fun stuff to post to your blog, website or to a community website (custom movie posters, jigsaw puzzles or trading cards).
• Find other people’s photos to use in your marketing or creative materials (but don’t forget to respect the creative commons copyrights on each photo in Flickr).
• Create a badge that is limited to a single tag and put that badge on your internal, more specifically focused web pages.

Flickr, more than many Web 2.0 applications, offers a ton of really fun things to do with your images (and those of others, too)! I’ve just scratched the surface of “things to do with Flickr” – do you all have any creative uses for Flickr at your library?

Facebook seems like an odd application for library use. It’s totally a social “utility” – as they say on the log-in page – and doesn’t seem to have many obvious library uses, beyond advertising programs and such. MySpace is much the same – it is intended for individuals (and bands – it started as a home page for bands to upload and share their music) and there aren’t many compelling reasons for libraries to “be” there… Unless you consider that part of the “philosophy” of Web/Library 2.0 is to be where your users are – whether that is in your library or in their browser (or cell phone text messaging application…).
Facebook has made it easier for organizations to use the service recently. People get profiles, just like in all the other social networking sites, but organizations get “pages”. From those pages, libraries can post information about their services, events and just about anything else that they want to advertise. Facebook also provides an application platform that allows 3rd party developers to create their own facebook applications. Because of this, Facebook has a lot of cool stuff to do while you are logged on. Many libraries have jumped on this application platform and created ways for their “fans” (people who friend the organization) to add a catalog search onto their own profiles. I modified a previously created catalog search for use at MRRL, and posted the code, with instructions, on the application’s page for other libraries to use.
Besides another platform for application programming, there are lots of other uses for it in libraries, too. Obviously, it is another way for patrons to contact us – opening a new line of communication, as it were. It’s a way to get your name out there – one public library in Edmonton, Canada, is doing tests on the effectiveness of highly targeted ads – and they are pretty pleased with the cost of getting in front of all of those eyeballs! It can also be used as a replacement for expensive “special use” software. One gentleman who attended the UKSG conference last month mentioned that his academic library is using Facebook in place of the very expensive VLE (Virtual Learning Environment) that they purchased and subsequently grew to hate.
MySpace has many of the same features and abilities – although it is sometimes difficult to stray away from the social aspects (friending, commenting, etc.), it can be done. One of the coolest interactions I’ve experienced was when I made our local radio stations friends of my library. One of the DJs for one of the stations left a comment on our page that basically asked if we had any poetry by Charles Bukowski. I left a comment on his radio’s MySpace page with a link to the catalog page that listed all the works we had by that author. He responded on the library’s page with a note saying thanks, but he owned everything we did. I finished the reference interview via MySpace with a final comment on his page asking him if he was familiar with Interlibrary Loan. That sort of interaction with the public – a real, not forced, natural conversation that was held on both of our MySpace pages – is the best way to get folks who may not be aware of your collection, programs or services to take a look at their public library.
Besides reference interviews via comments, you can republish all of your library’s content onto your MySpace page as well, making it much more likely that patrons (and soon-to-be patrons) find your “stuff”. I was recently asked by our Digital Librarian, Bobbi Newman to add the MySpace Crossposter plugin to our WordPress blog installation to allow automatic posting of all blog posts to our MySpace blog as well – no more duplication of effort!

del.icio.us is social bookmarking done right. I remember when online bookmark services first started appearing, solving the problem of people bookmarking a site on their home computer that they may need the next day on their work computer. I tried them out and found some of them to be fairly useful – then came del.icio.us. Not only does del.icio.us allow you to save URLs for later use, it also allows you to find URLs that others have found useful, suggest URLs for others and pick up feeds of either specific people, specific topics or general “top picks”. This is what makes it social.
The San Mateo Library’s del.ico.us account is a perfect example of an organization using the del.icio.us tools to create a very useful resource. They organize their saved URLs into the Dewey Decimal System (most of them, at least) with a few un-Dewey’d links tagged as “ready reference” or “book” or other not-quite-easily-stuffed-into-Dewey labels. That is one way to use the structure that del.icio.us provides.
Another way is to create useful links for patrons, like we have at MRRL’s account and make them available on our site as “reference links”. All of our links are ready reference-type links! I used a javascript library called “Dishy” to make pulling our links from del.icio.us easy on our Reference Links page. Because of the API (Application Programming Interface) that del.icio.us (and many other Web 2.0 tools) provides, creating new uses for your data becomes fairly easy. Dishy proved to be pretty much cut-and-paste functionality, allowing me to concentrate on the looks of the page, rather than the way it works – but if you really want to spend some time getting into the API, you can roll your own program that does exactly what you want. There are other ways to access your data through del.icio.us, though, including RSS, JSON and plain old HTML.
Once you put your data into del.icio.us (easy enough with the browser buttons they offer for both IE and Firefox), the options you have to reuse it are pretty much limitless!
Why?
I’ve covered the what people do with del.icio.us and pointed you to some resources for how, so now we’ll get a little deeper into “why”. Like most Web 2.0 tools, del.icio.us gives you the opportunity to save your data and then reuse it multiple ways. The API I mentioned above gives you control over your data – you put it in once and then use it in multiple ways (reference links, RSS feed of the latest “finds” from your library, in a Google Maps mashup with geographically important links, etc., etc., etc.) in multiple formats. It’s not only a great way to keep yourself organized at multiple computers, it’s also a great way to share the collective wisdom of your library and librarians with your patrons – it’s one more service you can offer your patrons to improve the quality of information they find on the Internet.

Anyone who has read my blog for any length of time knows I’m a total Twitter fangirl. I use it, and love it, daily. I evangelize about it! But, when I tell people how wonderful it is to have the collective mind floating through my Firefox sidebar each day, do I really do the possible useful applications of Twitter for libraries justice? Probably not, so here goes!
First, there are a lot of great posts out there about how to use Twitter in libraries. The last one (linked to the word “libraries”) even has a great explanation of what Twitter is. This is a great starting point to learn how other people use Twitter.
One great use of Twitter by a library is at LPI Library. They use it both for announcements of new books and programs, but also to contribute to the conversations that go on among the librarians using Twitter. The library ( for The Lunar and Planetary Institute) provides a lot of great information on topics within it’s specialty – it’s a handy Twitterer to follow whether you are interested in library topics or astronomical topics.
The way we (as in MRRL) use Twitter is as an announcement broadcaster that has the ability to broadcast our news to people’s cell phones, IM clients, web browsers and email clients – whichever they prefer. The way I (as in Webgoddess) use Twitter is as a water-cooler. I spend more time responding to other people in a conversational way as I do announcing what it is I’m doing. I spend as much time asking questions of the “hive mind” as I do announcing what it is I’m doing. Yes, I use it to keep my co-workers and friends apprised of what it is I’m doing with my day, but I like the social, not-quite-gossipy, but definitely chatty aspect of Twitter just as much as I do the work-related announcements of what I’m up to.
One very recent use of twitter (I blogged about it the other day) is to provide reference services via the Twitter architecture. The original idea is as a decentralized, 24/7 reference service, but it could be personalized for use in a busy library with a heavy population of cell phone users as well. Perhaps not as 24/7 service, but definitely during busy reference hours. The ability to text in reference questions is something that some libraries (Yale, for example) is doing already. Twitter would let smaller libraries offer this service without investing in the underlying architecture to handle the text messages – Twitter does that for them.
These are some of the uses that I find Twitter ideally suited for. What does your library do with Twitter? Is anyone using RSS from the catalog to populate a Twitter feed? How do you use Twitter?