Event Recap: Social Media in Libraries

Last Thursday Mylee Joseph, Project Leader, Innovation Project at the State Library of New South Wales, gave a fantastic talk at Customs House for a City of Sydney event about social media in libraries.

Mylee talked about the three opportunities for libraries with social media: discovery, engagement and collecting.

One of the attendees, Joachim Cohen, has put together a Storify of the event, which is well worth checking out. Mylee will also make her presentation available on Slideshare.

Below are just a few highlights from my notes:

Engagement

Commander Chris Hadfield's use of Twitter when he was on the International Space Station was historical in many ways. There were some great moments of engagement, such as William Shatner tweeting to ask if he was really in space, not to mention his version of Space Oddity, which had 22,630 retweets.

He also used reddit successfully. But Mylee emphasised that libraries shouldn't try to get into everything. Instead, choose a platform that suitable for the material you want to share, and is something your target audience uses.

For example, Google Hangouts can be great for author events, especially if they're in a different time zone. The interview can be held live on air and recorded for later viewing on YouTube.

Collection

Social media is ephemeral, so libraries have a place in keeping this record for future generations.

The Vatican archived Pope Benedict XVI's tweets, showing the importance of this record. The archived tweets can be seen alongside the Twitter feed of current Pope Francis' tweets.

There were 500,000 tweets about last week's #spill. Collecting so much information can be difficult, but could be useful to researchers.

Discovery

Flickr's The Commons is a way for cultural institutions to make their collections discoverable: the State Library has 1795 images, with well over 7.73 million views and 8933 people connected as contacts.

The Historypin app is being used heavily by the State Library as a way of allowing people to view historical photos of places where they are.

Creating or updating Wikipedia entries using the State Libraries holdings is a great way of sharing information about significant people or events. Two examples are an article on the Aboriginal Australian World War I soldier Douglas Grant, and an article on the recent DIY rainbow crossing movement in Sydney.

More Engagement

The State Library has had much success with Pinterest- their most popular board is HSC: Researching beyond Google.

Mylee advised libraries to be careful with what they repin- try to find the original source (and consider asking the original artists if you can pin their work).

When asked about the people needed, Mylee emphasised the need for a team-based approach. The marketing team are good at promoting events, but there also has to be people listening and (quickly) responding to questions and comments. At the State Library there is a 'coalition' of people authorised to respond via Twitter on behalf of their section.

Amy Croft
@amyecroft

Keeping Up

In the library and information world, even if we aren't familiar with the term Moore's law, which refers to the exponential growth of computing technology, we're familiar with the incredible rate of change in society, and in our profession, where we are constantly changing and adapting to new ideas and technologies.

The question is, how do we keep up with changes? Or better yet, how do we figure out what's coming and prepare for it?

There are different ways to keep up with what's happening, both inside and outside the library and information landscape.

Like 'The Busy Librarian', Matthew Winner, I would now say that Twitter is my PLN (personal learning network). I follow LOTS of people who share interesting thoughts, blog posts, articles, to the point where I'm not really worried that I'm missing out on anything important.

Here are some other ways I keep up (or kept up - pre-Twitter) which may be useful, especially for those not too keen on Twitter:

Steven Bell's Keeping Up Web Site is a thorough listing of resources for librarians about librarianship. It's a great starting point. And if that's not enough, check out the related topics on the left menu, such as Design, Teaching & Learning and Information Technology.

But be aware, on the page he makes the following announcement:

The Keeping Up Web Site is no longer being maintained on a regular basis. It is reviewed annually for link rot and minor changes. To be occasionally alerted to new keeping up resources subscribe to Steven Bell's Twitter feed: http://www.twitter.com/blendedlib

Sally Pewhairangi has a great blog, Finding Heroes, which is a daily roundup of links to interesting, thought-provoking stories or blog posts relevant to the library and information sector, in New Zealand and the rest of the world. You can subscribe via email, download the app, or follow her on Twitter (@sallyheroes). Sally finds the stories on Twitter and lists the Twitter handle of whoever tweeted the link.

The not-so-subtle subtext of the above three suggestions, is that you may want to use Twitter as a way of keeping up-to-date, if you aren't already.

Two other great sources of information are the ALIA Weekly newsletter (anyone can subscribe - ALIA members are automatically subscribed), and the PD Postings (ALIA members only).

There are many other ways (I haven't even touched on RSS feeds, going to conferences, going to awesome ALIA Sydney events, podcasts, and many more) - please add your tips for keeping up in the comments.

Amy Croft

@amyecroft

A morning in the life...

Hi!

This is Heather here, bringing you a post about how I start my work day and fit in a library world news update before the daily rush begins.

I tend to start my work day at around 8am as I am the person to call if you are calling in sick to work. I need to be in before those calls start and to look at rearranging the rosters before library opening at 9.30am.

I’ve come a long way since I first took over taking charge of the rosters nearly 18 months ago. At first I would stare at the roster and peer at the names on it until they became blurry and hope that they would just jump into place for me by themselves. They never did though, I always had to take the action myself.

Over time, the formula for how the rosters worked became so ingrained in my head that it has become very simple to move names around, knowing exactly where different people are able to work and what their needs and preferences are. I feel that doing this work has also improved my problem solving skills (as there is something to change nearly every day), my flexibility with my work and ability to cope with sudden disruption. I am constantly working with a house of cards that could fall to pieces any minute! It can be a stressful job, especially in winter, where we have had up to seven people call in sick on one day this year (my record is twelve), but generally, I’ve developed great coping skills and have learned not to be too precious about my beautiful and perfect roster being ruined by illness.

While I’m waiting for the calls to start coming in, I spend an hour or so checking twitter and reading blogs to put me into library mode for the day. I use twitter only professionally and find it a fantastic news stream of interesting articles and for gathering ideas. I follow other public libraries, other librarians I’ve met, library workers overseas, LIS bloggers, museums, public intellectuals, writers and artists, among others. Having a constant stream of inspiration headed my way every morning really increases the buzz from the first coffee of the day and has me feeling informed and excited about what’s going on before the rest of the library staff have even got here.

Although I mostly read and occasionally retweet, I’d love to connect with any others LIS professionals out there and hear what you have to say. You’ll find me @hettie_betty

Heather

Social Media and Librarians - ALLA Event

Hello everyone. I am excited to invite you to an ALLA NSW event in Western Sydney! Nathan Turner, the e-Resources Librarian at Parramatta City Library will show us the ways in which librarians can use social media such as Twitter, Pinterest and LinkedIn. We will also be discussing the crafting of a social media strategy.

When: 20 March 5.30pm

Where: Retro Room, Parramatta Library, Civic Pl, Parramatta NSW, 2150

How much: $10 (refreshments provided)

Please RSVP by emailing me at holger_aman@agd.nsw.gov.au by Monday 18 March. Please include any dietary requirements with your RSVP.

We hope to see you all there, especially our colleagues based in Western Sydney.

Holger Aman
Reference Librarian | Law Courts Library

Google Reader Roundup

Hello ALIA Sydney Readers! Today I’m going to share a quick roundup of good bits from my Google Reader, and take this opportunity for a good reflective think-out about blog readers.
The best thing about Google Reader is that you don’t have to use it all the time. You can dip into it occasionally or regularly, according to your needs. Recently I’ve been re-learning the flexibility of the ‘social’ in ‘social media’, especially with respect to my reading of blogs in and around the LIS field. If I read every interesting thing all the time, I’d get nowhere, unless I was undertaking a PhD on discourse analysis of LIS blogs. (actually that’s not a bad idea…) At present, Google Reader functions more like a trusted local café. I don’t have to go there all the time, or even regularly, but when I do there’s usually someone there to catch up with and have an interesting discussion.
I’ve shaped this roundup to include 7 useful blog post genres, and I’ll summarise them here for your (time management) convenience:
1. The LIS Reflective Practitioner Post
2. The Specific Call Out For Responses Post
3. The Managing Information Not Necessarily in LIS context Post
4. The Conference Roundup Post
5. The Online Participative Event
6. The Post about Teaching
7. The Scathing Rant

1. The LIS Reflective Practitioner Post
My first anniversary
After one year in the post as a college librarian. Cara Clarke reflects on her experiences working at a higher level and within a new library context  - a College Library – in comparison to her background in school libraries. The main value of this kind of post is the   candid nature in which Cara talks about her work environment and realities of professional life. It provides a useful insight into ‘on the ground’ work activities.

2. The Specific Call Out For Responses Post
‘repackaging’ information education – your input needed!
This blog post genre is characterised by a direct need for interaction. In this case, Kate Davis is seeking responses to 3 questions for ‘a context-setting/provocation video for a workshop that [she] is facilitating at the upcoming Australian Information Education Symposium on ‘repackaging’ information education’. If this is your bag, and you’ve got something to say, head over there now!  Seeing as I’ll be attending the Symposium, commenting on this blog is top of my list, but I have a post here to finish first!

3. The Managing Information Not Necessarily in LIS context Post
Twitterror, via 2cultures.net(.au)
This blog post poses an interesting idea to include strike through option on tweets. I can see why it would appeal to the latent proof reader and social historian in all of us. You can deal with your own misinformed tweets by ‘transparently’ adjusting them accordingly, rather than accepting the sometimes ambiguous vacuum left by a deleted tweet.  Ultimately it’s a translation of a live blogging /journaling trope whereby you can say exactly what you mean under the guise of deletion. I’ve seen it used to much hilarity in fanfiction communities that I belong to on dreamwidth. As the Twitter designers argue (quoted in their ubiquitous 140 characters), it would cause massive problems for their core function. However, as the author has demonstrated, it can also add a layer of discourse more suited to the boys' own shower room gossiping. Which is not how I prefer to engage with Twitter. Obviously any person on Twitter will tell you that people gravitate to their own groups and through constant negotiation develop rules and etiquette for discussion.

4. The Conference Roundup Post
University Science and Technology Librarians Group Meeting #USTLG
Blogs provide an excellent forum to share reflections from a conference tour, or even a big day of presentations. In this example  Librarians on the loose Sarah and Emma report on a twice yearly meetup to share information and good practice. And look, they’ve also shared the twitter hashtag if you want to look up the twitter archive.

5. The Online Participative Professional Development Event
Thing 7: Real life networks
The cpd23 is a blog-based summer online event (UK) which explores 23 things related to professional development for librarians and information professionals. It’s in its second round this year and looks to be a great way to develop your skills in social media relevant to LIS. Primarily because you’re exploring these tools with a network of geographically disparate people at the same time! That is, if you’ve scheduled the time to do it.
This week focuses on real life networks and commends participants to reflect on the place of professional organisations on their career path. There’s even extra credit for investigating new groups and organisations!

6. The Post about Teaching
Teaching: Design Anthropology via http://www.designculturelab.org
This post features a wonderful list for “How to be an Explorer of the World”, in a post which reflects on teaching design anthropology, with many salient points for learning, teaching and sharing knowledge within an educational setting. I often think that education and design fields are perfectly complementary to library and information science, and there’s much to be gained from the convergence (but not merging!) and overlapping of common threads.

7. The Scathing Rant
Libraries: crowdfunding our asses off
A bombastic rant reflecting on the reputation of libraries and the impact of the digital economy enabled by the globalisation and late capitalism. Censored genius is your go-to librarian when you want to get all riled up about the state of libraries today. I particularly love the effing librarian for their delivery of high quality invective on issues in the library profession. No blog roundup would be complete without this kind of blogging.

Obviously, this is a partial and highly selective list. Do you have a favourite blogger that you turn to for any of the above genres? What other contenders might there be for blog post genres?

Over and out,
Liz Stokes
ALIA New Grads Coordinator NSW

Unleash numbers! Social media and OA repositories

Oscar Wilde famously stated “The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.” This is quite poignant when one considers the open access institutional repository movement, for what is the point of archiving and making your research available on open access if nobody knows it’s there!

Sadly this has been the case with much of the material archived in repositories. The submission process and getting the publications “out there” is, in the main, a passive affair with repositories waiting patiently for their metadata to be harvested. As a result, overall usage statistics tend to be low even when the item is first uploaded. This can be disheartening for the author, not to mention the long-suffering repository manager.

However with a little bit of self-promotion through the use of social media tools such as Twitter, Facebook and other platforms an item deposited can become “hot” and achieve healthy usage statistics. After all that’s why the work was made “open access” in the first place.

The promotional aspect of alerting the world to the location of something is self-evident, however how significant it is? We looked at three items that were submitted to the Sydney eScholarship Repository and made available in open access on the same day. The author of one of the items used his Twitter and Facebook accounts to publicise his work, while the other two authors relied on the passive process.

Using Google Analytics and assessing access for the three items we could see that:

·         The item that was tweeted received far more hits, especially on the first day (454 versus 10 and 6 respectively).

·         On the second day the tweeted item still received 90 hits whereas the other two items received none.

Using Twitter’s 140 characters to post some information and a persistent link to a substantial piece of research in a repository is a great mechanism for researchers to get their message out fast and effectively. The authors of the top five most viewed items in the Sydney eScholarship repository in May 2012 tweeted, used Facebook, blogs and other social media tools to alert their peers, colleagues and followers of the availability of their work.

There are obviously a number of factors that may also contribute to an increase in usage statistics such as the size of one’s social media network, the nature of the content and access, etc. However, at a cursory glance one can see the value in using social media. There is obviously a need for much more research in this area and I look forward to reading it.

Many institutional repositories continue to suffer from low uptake. If they are able to prove through real time statistics that when combined with social media activity, access and usage can increase considerably, there is a strong case to be made for open access repositories.

But don’t take my word for it, watch Professor Simon Chapman http://youtu.be/RIkupM1xxvI talking about his experiences with social media during our OA Week Activities.

Sten Christensen

Sydney eScholarship, University of Sydney Library