Social media spaces are the new UBC ‘commons’

The UBC School of Library, Archival and Information Studies (SLAIS) is one of the few schools (the only?) on the UBC Vancouver campus offering an entire course on social media. An intrepid group of student archivists and librarians and I are working through a series of six modules that examine social media’s role in the information age. Given some of the dire talk about “the library as place…is dead” I think it’s useful to think about how academics, librarians and students will meet in the future to discuss books, artefacts and ideas ….in the absence of physical libraries.

• First, is it even possible to create a new kind of digital learning ‘commons’ with social media?

My simple answer is: yes. The idea of a ‘library commons’ is very popular in academic libraries — but this is both in the physical sense where we meet students and faculty members (as well as in the digital spaces) and online where librarians can create opportunities to collaborate with our various user groups. Think of the possibilities for academic librarians when we find tools that our user groups are familiar with, use and inhabit daily — you can sit down and talk to them in the digital space (and plan to meet for coffee later).

• OK. So, what kinds of digital services & spaces can be created for interaction and collaboration?

I think when the UBC community really examines the range of digital media for interaction the conclusion will be that there are endless possibilities. However, what seems critical to me is that we provide for learning in open and closed spaces; and that we match the tools with our users’ needs and our organizational goals. At the moment, Twitter is very popular — and may be a good starting point for some libraries who want to send short blasts of information to busy faculty and students-on-the-go.

• In building new spaces for communication and information-exchange, what is the role of Open source?

I think the same sense of participation and collaboration that drives social media is also behind the movement towards open source. Some folks in archives and libraries want to control their communication practices but do not want to be ‘out there on the web’ or to have a digital presence — thus, a locally mounted Moodle might be a better alternative; some tech-savvy librarians might not be able to afford an integrated proprietary library system ….so perhaps Ubuntu might be the answer. But — we need to consider the potential of these online spaces.

• Through the adoption of information technologies, can we create a new kind of hi-tech academic-information professional hybrid?

I think in my field of academic health librarianship this is absolutely critical. Health librarians need to have all the traditional skills of our profession but also be increasingly aware of how different media fit with the changes that are happening in the sciences — especially the changes in the way that our faculty and user groups are communicating and collaborating on projects… This heightened awareness of web 2.0 will make it possible to offer creative new services and to find solutions to difficult information problems.

• Can we use social media to organize digital libraries and participate in the semantic web?

This is my goal. We can already see that some tools like LibraryThing can decentralize tagging — which has a lot of semantic data that can be used for describing and finding documents. “Open tagging” of library resources should be on the radar screens of every information professional. Many organizations are already using tags – think of the Smithsonian and the University of Pennsylvania, to name but two.