Anyone who knows me knows that I attend as many library workshops and meetings as I can. I recently attended "Blogs and Wikis and Podcasts, Oh My!" Which, of course, are all great tools for libraries. Although, I'm not completely sold on Podcasts yet. What interested me most in this workshop, however, really had little to do with libraries.
First they talked about mobile devices (which I do not own) and how they bring the private world of the PC to the public spaces like the subway. I use twitter.com as a way to learn about news during the day. What twitter does is allows me to go about my business and if something happens in the world...or at my friends house...that person tweets about it and I read it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter It's a social network of sorts since you can find people and add people to your followed friends list BUT it's also a micro-blog, or a little update. I have a few libraries that I follow on twitter. They don't update often, but when they do it directs me to their blog or let's me know that their hours are changing for the summer, etc. I think it's better for librarian-to-librarian updates, but people are using for all kinds of things. In fact, I had a librarian following me while I was at the workshop AND I was twittering away...giving her links to what we were learning about. How does twitter tie in with mobile devices? Well, this librarian follows twitter on her mobile device so she is constantly informed by her twitter friends! It's really a very cool thing!
A few other sites that were mentioned at this workshop were digg, skype and facebook. With skype you can make phone calls from your computer. Why use a phone when there's skype? I'm not completely sold on that. This is DIGG http://digg.com/how Another one I have never used, but I like the idea of it. It's a social network of sorts that uses popular websites to connect people, from what I understand. I'm not sure how libraries could use it, but I have heard about it from numerous librarians who are online. Facebook is a social network, not unlike MySpace, where you find people you know and add them as friends. You can play games with them, leave them comments, join groups, and even send out party invitations on facebook. Of course, if not all of your friends are on facebook you'll find yourself using email and evite and snail mail as well as facebook to invite everyone to your shindig. Can you tell I have some experience in this? The difference here is that libraries ARE using facebook and MySpace to connect with patrons and staff members as well as other libraries to collaborate. Think about it. If your patrons are constantly "plugged in" as I like to call it, and you are a "friend" on their Facebook page you can tell them about upcoming events or hour changes or even have a link on your social network page directly to your catalog. You can also link your live help there too!
We learned about Wikis and podcasts too, which I plan to blog about on another day. They really each need their own blog.
The woman closing the workshop told us about a bunch of really neat stuff, and I have been trying to figure out why. This workshop is for librarians, so why did she tell us about whoissick.com? A website where you go on and put your mark on the map telling people what your ailments are. Why did she tell us about mash-ups and QR Codes which don't even exist in the US yet? Why? Because librarians are all about information. Librarians want to know where people are getting their information if it's not from a library. Librarians want to know how they can get the information first so they can give it to their patrons so their patrons keep coming back for more.
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