My biggest challenge in this course is trying to see things from the perspective of a librarian and not a user. I visit my public library maybe twice a week, and mainly for books. I'd put myself in the lower/middle range of the library school population spectrum for technological with-it-ness, but in terms of the general population, I'm much, much higher. And I don't subscribe to my library's RSS feed or cruise their del.ic.ious page.
For me, this discipline is all about connecting people with information: I get the connections with information literacy, and the importance of understanding the technological backdrops, but for me, the most important criteria has to be: does this improve the fundamental service we offer to our patrons?
My Preliminary and Very General List of Best Practices
1. Include the targeted community in the planning and development stages of implementing social software. Make sure that what you are planning is relevant and feasible for your users, and draw on their expertise. (For example, use high school students who need to volunteer for credit and know more than you do.)
2. Make sure your use of social software is consistent with your library's mission and values-- especially in terms of privacy
3. Be accessible. I'm somewhat wary of public libraries using applications like Facebook because, while it meets students where they are, its nature is to be closed and private. It plays to the in-group. If you're not on Facebook, you're excluded, and that seems to go against the accessible nature of libraries.
4. Target your audience-- keep your focus narrow and specific (ie: Harry Potter, not Children's Literature, or Community Historical Sites, not History).
5. Use social software to compliment your services, not to revolutionize them-- especially if you are a library with a diverse (in terms of age/ ablity/ access to technology) user group.
6. Do not use social software exclusively-- if you have a Harry Potter party at your library, don't just create a facebook event for it-- also have physical posters in your library, too. Don't exclude people because their unfamiliar with a specific technology.
7. Maintain consistency between your traditional methods and your digital methods, and between print resources and your electronic resources. For example, your del.ic.ious tags should not be fundamentally different from your library's general (overview) classification scheme.
8. Constantly evaluate whether or not your new-fangled services are doing what they are supposed to: are people commenting on your blog? Is your RSS feed being used? Has your wiki been overrun by a small minority?
9. Maintain (and update!) FAQs about new technologies.
10. Do not expect students to want to friend your library. :-)
And now off to review the case studies...
5 comments:
I agree with your post and your feelings about being a librarian and not so much a user, but deep down, being a user, and being aware of possibilities that can improve or better the library should be seen a beneficial. Having the opportunity to see it from both worlds can be great, and help you along the way as a professional.
Jeremie
Excellent post, Leah. And that is a very impressive start on your best practices list! I think your skepticism over the adoption of a lot of these tools is healthy, certainly more so than the impulse (which we're seeing a lot these days) to just go ahead and adopt these tools because they're easy and we can. I especially appreciate your take on the library's adoption of facebook - you're right, it IS a closed community, for the most part, certainly not conclusive. But as long as libraries don't allow the adoption of these tools to undermine their other services (that serve their non-2.0 patrons), they should be OK.
I think you should transfer your thoughts to the best practices wiki--they are great!
Jill
What a fantastic list of best practices Leah. I agree with all of them, and especially like the points about not "revolutionizing" services, achieving consistency (in essence branding your site),performing constant (user)evaluation and maintenance of sites. They seem like simple things, but probably not always at the forefront!
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