David Lee King

social media | emerging trends | libraries

IL2008: Public Libraries & Web 2.0

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Zeth Lietzau – He did a study on public libraries and web 2.0 tools…

What is Library 2.0? – They defined it via the Wikipedia definition.

Looked at:

  • online catalog
  • personalized library account
  • blogs/rss
  • virtual reference
  • wikis
  • social networking
  • podcasting

in large libraries (ones that serve over 500,000 people), only 45% have an online library card signup! Libraries that serve 100,000 – 499,999 only 15% have an online signup form. Yikes! Uhm… this is not hard, people – it’s a simple signup form!

Other numbers were quite dismal…

estimated percentage of US libraries using various 2.0 technologies:

  • catalog tags – 1%
  • facebook – 2%
  • flickr – 5%
  • online card signup – 5%
  • MySpace – 6%
  • RSS Feeds – 14%
  • Chat Reference – 22%
  • Email reference – 31%
  • Blogs – 31%
  • Online account access – 56%
  • online catalog – 62%
  • web presence – 82%

Some good examples for libraries (from 2005 stats):

  • Hennepin County Library
  • Lincoln City Liberaries
  • Benicia Public Library
  • Rocky River Public Library
  • Lena Public Library

What do these innovators have that other libraries don’t?

  • they have more staffing
  • more money per capita
  • bigger audio/visual collections
  • they have more circ/more use of the library

Notes from SEDIC

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SEDIC Conference in the National Library of SpainThe last conference I spoke at in Spain was for SEDIC (Asociacion Espanola de Documentacion e Informacion) in Madrid. Here are the notes I took during the other sessions.

Introductions:

  • Milagros del Corral Beltran (the Director of the Spanish National Library): opened session, thanked the U. S. Embassy for participating, then mentioned something about how U. S. libraries are doing lots of 2.0 stuff.
  • Rosario Lopez de Prado (president of SEDIC): talked about web 2.0 being an easy to use set of tools. Mentioned that SEDIC was another great tool for libraries. Said the U. S. Embassy was a great example and leader.
  • Margaret H. Bond (Agregada Adjunta de Prensa de la Embajada de EE.UU. – she worked at the Embassy): she said some nice things about me, and some other stuff, too … about then, I stopped listening for a sec, because I noticed that every time the photographer (there was an “official” photographer at the session) took a flash photo, the translator headset I was using made a popping noise… and I found that rather interesting and distracting… 🙂

Next up – a session on Learning 2.0 in Spain!

Natalia Arroyo spoke first:

  • Natalia gave an overview of how their learning 2.0 program went. I think she said this version was primarily for para-professionals (which is pretty cool).
  • [then the interpreter told me she needed to rest her voice for when she interpreted me, so stopped interpreting for awhile – so I didn’t catch all of this session]
  • She discussed their goals: to create a learning community, spontaneous learning – student to student, continuous learning, hands-on
  • It went for 8 weeks. Look at these numbers: 8 instructors, 1190 participants!
  • More than just Spain – they had Latin American and Portugese participants, too.

Isabel Fernandez spoke next about the wiki they set up for the Learning 2.0 program:

  • she discussed how and why they used a wiki
  • the wiki focused on introducing 2.0 tools
  • gave a general overview of wikis
  • Mentioned Ohio Universities Biz Wiki as a good example (go, Chad!). Also the Seville Library wiki.
  • Mentioned the Library Success wiki, too (go Meredith!)
  • Also mentioned an academic library 2.0 wiki (not familiar with that one)
  • Had a couple great ideas for encouraging and growing participation on the wiki: thank users personally, welcome first-time users, and acknowledge the wiki writers’ work.

Then I spoke (I’ll share my presentation in the next post).

It was a great day, great content, and wonderful librarians.

New Song & Video: Hi-fi Sci-fi Library

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You HAVE to watch the amazing cool music video Michael Porter and I made!!! Here it is:

Want the MP3? Find it at last.fm

Go read Michael’s post for the nitty-gritty details (and this post for the lyrics and credits). Here are some song details…

This was a really fun song to write and record. I honestly wasn’t sure Michael’s idea would work when he first suggested it to me, but then I’m game for just about anything, so thought “let’s try it and see what happens!” And Michael’s a great friend and writing partner (we write the Public Libraries Magazine column “Internet Spotlight” together), so if everything else went down the tubes, I knew we would at least have a fun time of it. But as we started writing the lyrics, rhythms and melody lines started bouncing around in my head… and I realized this would be easy to pull off.

Other details:

  • The music is a mix of GarageBand instruments, my own guitar playing, and three samples of theremins and other whistle-like sounds.
  • And Michael Porter and I sang/rapped the thing
  • recorded and mixed in Garageband, in my basement

Samples used:

New Ways to Think about Technology and Tools, Part 2: Driving a Car

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Smart CarHere’s another post on new ways to think about technology and tools (see my last post for the first one).

Here’s a photo of a Smart Car. Do you think you could drive it? Yes? Cool. How about if something broke – could you fix it… or would you need to hire a mechanic? I know I couldn’t fix it – I’m pretty much at the mercy of the auto mechanic when it comes to doing practically anything under the hood of a car.

And you know what? that’s ok. I don’t have to understand the technology to use the technology.

It’s the same way with computers and the emerging social web, too. For example, in order to blog… you don’t have to know how to build a blog. You really only need some very basic typing skills. In fact, in some of my recent presentations, I’ll ask people if they they can type a Microsoft Word document and hit save – and of course, they all say “yes, I can do that.” Then I tell them they just admitted that they have the skills needed to blog. Then it gets really quiet… 🙂

Using most of this new-fangled social software is much like driving a car – you don’t have to understand the techie stuff in order to use it. You need other skillsets (like driving).

So – get out and drive!

The Social Web and Libraries: Listening to your Community

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Many of us work on listening to our user communities. In the library world, we listen at the reference desk and the circ desk. We hear about the library when we’re at the grocery store (and get asked questions, too 🙂 and at the local board meeting.

But how do you listen to your local digital community? How do you hear what your online customers are doing / saying / liking / or not liking about your library? Here are some possibilities, from the late 1990s – early 2000s. We’ll call these …

Traditional Listening Tools:

  • email: providing an email link and/or an email address on each page of the site, usually in the footer
  • An Ask Us page – can go to email, can also be the ask a librarian service point
  • a digital comment box (this was fancy back then!)

I’m calling them “traditional listening tools” because there are many more interesting ways to listen now. Check these out …

Shiny New Listening Tools:

  • Google Alerts – finds blog posts, newspaper articles, local media mentions, etc.
  • Technorati alerts – finds blog posts about you
  • Twitter searches (was Summize) – captures twitter conversations (more on Summize/twitter search in the next post)
  • Youtube alerts – do a search, then subscribe to the corresponding RSS feed.
  • Flickr alerts – subscribe to a tag related to your library
  • Subscribe to local blogs and local twitter feeds. This captures conversation in your community, by your patrons.

When you listen using both the Traditional Listening Tools and the Shiny New Listening Tools, you hear very different things. Traditional Listening Tools pick up specific conversation that is purposefully directed at you – via email. Someone has a question or comment, and sends that comment to you.

Shiny New Listening Tools help you discover actual conversations taking place. Those conversations are not necessarily directed at you – but they can certainly be about you. Listening in on Twitter, for example, might find things like this: “The comics section at the Seattle Public Library is f**king STUNNING.” (actual tweet from today). And this type of tweet is a golden opportunity to START a conversation. Let’s pretend this comment happened at the reference desk for a sec – how would you reply? Possibly with something like: “gee, thanks.” That’s a polite response… some of us would probably go one further, and say something like this: “Cool – thanks! So… WHY do you like it? How could we improve it?” This type of response continues a conversation, and pulls out useful info in the process.

DO THAT SAME THING IN YOUR SHINY NEW DIGITAL SETTING.

Again, more on that in my next post… but you get the idea. When you’re eavesdropping on conversations, you have the opportunity to chime in – correct wrong info, add to conversations about the library, and generally help humanize your digital branch by “talking back.”

Wow David – That Sounds Time-Consuming!

Does all this listening take a long time? No – not really. The set-up (doing the searches and subscribing to the feeds) takes the longest amount of time. But once your feeds are set up, it really doesn’t take much time to quickly scan through the results, looking quickly for questions, praises, suggestions, and conversation.

Start participating with those customers using your digital branch. If you do this fully, your listening experience can be transformed from one of eavesdropping to what amounts to a shiny new service point for your library. One that’s called Community Manager in the corporate world.

Your customers are already talking – are you listening?

photo: http://flickr.com/photos/practicalowl/433659667/