Book Report!

The book that I read was  Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture, by Henry Jenkins. The author is a media studies expert from MIT, and is writing from the position of a fan who has made his profession studying pop culture and fandom.  One main point of this work is the way that the internet has created a new relationship to media, as well as new ways for people to form relationships to each other. The consumption of culture has become social in a different way, creating new communities and new communication across physical boundaries. Fans have found each other and formed networks within which they can circulate their reactions and interpretations, going beyond the passive consumption of media. This communication and connection is one of the main benefits of the internet for librarians and library patrons as well as for fans and enthusiasts. Connecting with and helping people who are physically distant from your library is, to my eyes, the most important development currently taking place. Users no longer have to come to the reference desk to get support, help, and advice. The more channels open to them, the more likely they are to get the information they need from the library, and the more likely they are to want to reach out and ask for the help they need. Another important point is the need to understand the ways young people in particular interact with technology. Jenkins argues that adults are suspicious of adolescents' use of the internet because they don't understand it. Teens have a greater mastery of this skill, so it should be suppressed in order for adults to maintain their control. This is something that librarians need to work against. We, as a profession, should try to understand these developments and use them to have positive outcomes for everyone involved. Since people want to use new technologies, librarians should help them to use them to the greatest effect. Teach people how to find the best online resources and how to evaluate the quality of information they are being exposed to and think critically about it. This can be a step towards our society trusting our teens online. We can't keep them off the internet, we can only teach them how to use it widely. Like Dr. Jenkins, I feel that these new developments, while they can seem overwhelming and intimidating, can be very exciting and useful. We just have to try to understand them for what they are and figure out how we can put them to best use.

Delicious Social Bookmarking in libraries

Social bookmarking is one Web 2.0 tool that has been implemented by libraries. It seems like kind of a difficult one to do really well, because there is so much stuff out there on the web. No one has time or energy to do more than a cursory and random smattering of websites unless a decision is made to keep a very focused scope. However, I think that attempts to guide people to useful and interesting resources on the web is a natural offshoot of the mission of libraries and should be encouraged to the greatest degree possible. If done correctly, Delicious can help librarians to help their patrons find useful and reliable information on the internet.
An interesting library on Delicious is the San Mateo Library. This library has organized their links into bundles by Dewey Decimal. This is useful in some ways, because it gives a hierarchy to the organization of the links and it is a hierarchy that librarians already find effective. However, it could make things more confusing for a casual user who is not as literate in DDC as a librarian, making the numbers seem random. The tags also have the topic in them, but the numbers make it seems kind of cluttered. But if people know how to use it, it is a good system for keeping links organized and helping guide people to what they need. Tag bundles are definitely a good idea for library pages.

From this blog post, via Flickr, from the Topeka and Shawnee County Public Library 

I like this image a lot, because I think this poster conveys the most important aspects of Library 2.0, and why librarians should try to integrate these tools. It provides more ways to connect with users and gives opportunities for more services. It also can remind us that it is important to make sure library users are aware of the resources available to them at the library.

I thought that this video was interesting and relevant to our discussion in class last week. It outlines some of the pros and cons of having and maintaining a blog versus a website. It has a more commercial perspective, but that can be useful for librarians to think about as well, since it will be more focused on optimizing outputs and increasing traffic. There are also a lot of comments on the YouTube page, including one from the uploader mentioning that her own views about blogging have changed since she made the video. I definitely think that it is an interesting starting place, although certainly not an answer to the question of which is better.

Library Blogs

While I was learning about blogs for this week's assignment, I looked at quite a few library websites and blogs. There are many different strategies being used in library world right now. I saw websites that had news and event calendars on their home pages, but no formal blogs. There were also institutions advertising their Facebook and Twitter pages as a way to get news and communicate with the library. Many libraries also had a blog on their website, and the contents and set-up of these blogs came in several forms. Some libraries used the blog to announce upcoming events at the library, while others focused on new acquisitions and displays. One university library had entries about mostly practical, day-to-day library concerns, like special hours or database outages.
My favorite of the blogs I perused was the one run by the Leddy Library at the University of Windsor. It has a really nice mix of useful content, including upcoming events, library policy reminders and updates, features on new resources, recommended books, and other library news. The entries are categorized by topic and the subject area students the news is relevant to. RSS feed is also enabled, allowing students to subscribe to get updates only about events, or only news relating to Engineering. The blog is also searchable and the archives are linked on the sidebar and easy to use. Comments are enabled (although it doesn't seem to get many). All in all, it is a helpful and easy to use blog.