Author: Amy Ashmore

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Projects

The End

Last night I presented my final project for LIBR 559M, and really enjoyed the discussion that followed. For the project I developed a series of public library programs which would allow teenagers to work with and learn about social media, a concept that has become rather dear to me. Here are the slides from my presentation:

LIBR 559M Final Presentation

If you have any thoughts, I’d love to hear them!
This will likely be my last blog post here, but I’ve really enjoyed blogging, and I hope to do more of it in the future. Thanks to my classmates and Dean for an engaging semester – I’ve learned a lot from all of you!

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Just Because Managing Social Media Reference Services

Information Is Not An Island

I really, really wanted to title this post “The Short Second Life of Amy Ashmore,” since hanging out in Second Life did in fact feel a lot like a poorly written vampire novel (sorry, Stephenie Meyer). Watching my avatar fly around, I even felt a bit like a vampire – I had become something other than myself (and markedly less human-looking) and was zooming around in a world where no other people seemed to exist.

I managed to resist the urge, however, (although clearly not the urge to tell you about it), since what I really am interested in is one particular aspect of Second Life: the concept of Information Islands. This spatial metaphor troubles me. Information should not be an island. Ideally, it should be available anywhere, anytime, whenever it is needed. The whole concept of having information seeking be a part of this virtual world suggests (to me) the premise that information should be available anywhere. But by using the concept of information islands, Second Life seems to be reinforcing the idea that information can only be found in certain locations (ie. a library), and that even in a virtual world these locations are physical.

Of course, Second Life is not alone in this – the web is populated with spatial methaphors: websites, postings on walls, dashboards. I guess I was hoping that in an immersive virtual world, we might get away from this, at least when it comes to information. No such luck.

Admittedly, I have absolutely no personal interest in Second Life and would never choose to be in that environment outside of a professional capacity. But even assuming that users were already there, the software and design seems to add steps to accessing information, not remove them. Both times that I went to Info Island, I found it empty. Eerily so. Does that mean the users in Second Life have no information needs? I doubt it. But why manoeuvre yourself all the way over to Info Island when Google is just a browser click away? (I found manoeuvring myself anywhere at all to be a challenge). I’ll pick ease over immersion any time, and judging by the fact that hanging out on Info Island felt like being Tom Hanks in Castaway except with more buildings, I’m guessing other Second Lifers feel the same.

But wait. Moving away from physical spaces. Isn’t this what many librarians are trying to do with information in the real world? I’m not saying there’s no place for the reference desk – after all, I spend my days sitting behind one. But in the real world, users don’t have to go there every time they want to know something. They can email. They can chat. Maybe they can even tweet their information needs. In the real library world, there is certainly a huge push to see the library as more than a physical space. So why replicate the physical space in virtual environments? Now, I realise that providing information services isn’t what Second Life was designed for. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t ways to move beyond these constraints. It’s also possible that there are a whole slew of Second Life information-seeking features I just don’t know about. But I certainly couldn’t find them. So what gives, Second Life? I want to get off this island.

Categories
Just Because Managing Social Media Reference Services

Personal Aggregation vs. Mediated Aggregation

This week in LIBR 599M, we were asked: Is aggregation a new role for librarians? Haven’t we always gathered, organized and used classification systems, integrated information? If we take aggregation to mean a combination or composite of date from a number of sources, then I tend to agree that aggregation is not a new phenomenon for librarians. Using this definition, traditional tools of librarianship like indexes, encyclopedias, and even subject guides can be described as aggregated content.

In what ways has Web 2.0 changed the ways in which information is aggregated? I see three important differences (although there are probably others):

  1. The kind of information that is being aggregated has shifted – user-generated web content has become increasingly significant
  2. The speed with which information can be aggregated has dramatically increased
  3. And, although this is more debatable, I would argue that who is doing the aggregating may be shifting. That is, users, rather than librarians, are aggregating their own information.

Now, I’m not suggesting that people have never created their own personal learning tools and that this has always been done by information professionals. That’s not true. But the new reality is that what used to take years to compile might now take only minutes. This massive shift in speed and ease, combined with a substantial change in the amount and type of content out there, means that increasingly I think people are finding their own ways to pull together the information they need, rather than requiring the library to do it for them (and I am making an enormous generalization here which is certainly true of everyone). Now, after suggesting that aggregation has historically been a role of libraries, I don’t mean that this is no longer the case. In the recent CARL/ARBC environmental scan of academic libraries which I assisted with, RSS feeds were the only tool we found to be used by every single library we looked at, and I’m sure these feeds are incredibly valuable. But I would also guess that a not-insignificant number of students and faculty at these universities also use personal RSS feeds to aggregate self-selected content. These feeds are personally tailored to the interests of each individual user.

Let’s take my own RSS feeds as an example. There’s a lot of stuff about libraries in there, but also updates from The Sartorialist, friends’ blogs, and music reviews. No library in the world would provide me with this exact mix in a single feed – but I easily have the power to create it myself. When I really want to point out here is that there is a difference between my personal aggregated content and that mediated by others. As Lorcan Dempsey writes, “One clear development is a blurring of our social, business, learning and educational lives as the pattern of our communication and interaction across time and space changes.” Both self-selected and mediated content can be very valuable, but they likely serve slightly different functions. So maybe part of the real power of Web 2.0 is (bad joke alert) the possibility of having your aggregated cake, and reading it too. For libraries, we need to know how to use new tools to access new information, but it’s clear that we can also have a role in teaching our users how to do the same.

Categories
Projects

Project Outline: Social Media Programming for Young Adults

This past week in LIBR 559M, our focus was on creation. Earlier in the week I shared a YouTube video with my class that I made for another SLAIS course. However, this week also marked my first ever upload to SlideShare. The file I uploaded is an outline of my final project for the class, which will be a proposal for a public library program aimed at encouraging young adults to learn about social media tools and create their own content.  The slides are below:

LIBR 559M Project Outline

I’d love to have your feedback on this! Leave me a comment, send me an email (aeb.ashmore@gmail.com), or tweet @amyashmore.

Categories
Just Because

The Top 5

“Vince:  What’s the name of your label?
Rob: Top Five Records.”

If you’ve seen the movie or read the book High Fidelity, you’ll know that one of the ongoing narrative elements is the use of Top 5 lists. This week in LIBR 559M, we were asked to contribute our top 5 uses of social media in libraries to a collaborative list which we created. But I love making lists (insert librarian joke here), so since this week’s module is about creation, I’ve created a few more “Top 5” library-related lists of my own.

Top 5 Videos:

  1. No Hope (Security Man…ual series from VPL)
  2. Roving Librarians
  3. Study Like a Scholar, Scholar (BYU)
  4. Librarians Do Gaga (UW)
  5. What is A Public Library

Top 5 Blogs:

  1. LISNews
  2. Librarian.net
  3. Blogging for a Good Book
  4. What I Learned Today
  5. Awful Library Books

Top 5 Uses of Social Media for Teens:

  1. Teen RC
  2. Darien Library (specifically the TeenCast and Made sections)
  3. Allen County Public Library (especially Bella’s Book Club)
  4. My Own Cafe – Southeastern Massachusetts Library System
  5. Seattle Public Library (great Push to Talk Blog and podcasts)

I should note that these are largely based on things I read or knew about already – if you have other ideas to contribute or have your own “top 5” I’d love to hear it!

Categories
Collaboration

“With A Little Help From My Friends:” Social Media and Civic Engagement

This week in LIBR599M we’ve been talking about collaboration. At the beginning of the week, we were asked some interesting questions. What role does social media play in democracies around the world? Why might these issues be important in libraries? What role do librarians play in this arena called ‘civic engagement’? Can one get an accurate sense of community in digital spaces? In thinking about these questions, I returned to one of the concepts I explored in the first week of class: civic media. A link to the definition we created in week one is here: civic media is essentially communication which strengthens social bonds and fosters civic engagement. The use of social media for this purpose often allows for an immediacy which I believe can have a profound effect on the way community building occurs in digital spaces.

I keep returning to this quote, from MIT’s Center for Future Civic Media:
“Transforming civic knowledge into civic action is an essential part of democracy. As with investigative journalism, the most delicate and important information can often focus on leaders and institutions that abuse the trust of the communities they serve. By helping to provide people with the necessary skills to process, evaluate, and act upon the knowledge in circulation, civic media ensures the diversity of inputs and mutual respect necessary for democratic deliberation. Some of what emerges here looks like traditional journalism, while some moves in radical new directions.”

The emphasis above is my own. For me, this bolded sentence is the crux –  this is also an important part of what we can do as librarians. We provide information, put hopefully we are also helping to foster the skills which allow people to evaluate, contextualize, and use information effectively. However, the concept of civic media suggests that this is not only a top-down relationship – we can all learn something from each other. And that is perhaps the truest form of collaboration.

Categories
Managing Social Media

Catalogue This: Managing Information in Social Media Applications

I was one of the first Canadians to have Facebook. Back in 2004 when Facebook was only open to post-secondary students, I was an undergraduate at McGill, the first Canadian institution to have Facebook access. I don’t say this as some sort of bragging point, but to illustrate the following:   over 6 years of my life are, to a greater or lesser extent, documented on Facebook. Until a couple of days ago when I started to seriously consider what this meant, there were well over 1,200 pictures of me tagged on Facebook, and I had about 45 photo albums posted. In some cases, due to previous computer failure, these were the only copies of the photos that existed. Although I’ve decreased both of those numbers slightly over the past few days, that’s still a hefty number of photos to deal with. Don’t even get me started on messages, or even worse, wall posts.

So here’s the question: what are social media platforms doing (or not doing) to help users manage the information they’re creating in these online environments? While some do this well, some, including Facebook, aren’t doing enough. If you use Facebook a fair amount, you’ve probably, like me,  spent far too long looking for that elusive photo or post. I don’t plan to get rid of my Facebook account in the near future, so I’ve started to seriously consider not only how I manage the way I’m presenting myself online, but how to manage the sheer volume of what I have out there.

This is an important consideration for information professionals. If we want to use these tools in a professional capacity, we need to think about how to manage the information we produce, or the information produced by others in relation to us. One of the significant things about producing information online (as authors like Erika Pearson and Anders Albrechtslund point out) is that it is often enduring. But the utility of this is drastically reduced if we can’t easily locate the things we need. The longer we have been using a specific tool, and the more we use that tool, both the significance of this need and the difficulty of accomplishing it are greatly increased.

Now, what can I do about all these Facebook photos?

Image: “My Social Network.” Flickr. http://www.flickr.com/photos/luc/1824234195

Categories
Just Because

If libraries are the next big thing, is social media behind it?

By now, many of us in the library world are familiar with Linda Holmes’ NPR article about libraries as the next big pop culture wave, after cupcakes. And I’m all for it. I love libraries even more than I like cupcakes. And you should know that I really, really enjoy cupcakes.

But what I want to speculate about today is: If libraries are “in,” is social media really at the heart of this? I think it might be.

I was first made aware of Holmes’ piece through one of my many daily RSS feeds. Before I knew it, the article was zooming around the internet (or at least my library-centric corner of it), being sent out on listservs, tweeted and re-posted on facebook, and blogged by librarian bloggers around the world. Oh wait, kind of like I’m doing right now.

And then there was the starting point for Holmes’discussion: the YouTube videos. First there was Librarians doing Gaga. Then the Old Spice man had something to say about libraries, and Brigham Young University wanted us to study like a scholar, scholar. Things so popular, they were shared by people with no connection to libraries whatsoever (at least according to the extremely scientific evidence of my Facebook News Feed).

So it would seem that social media is certainly helping us to make libraries popular though online sharing. But how does this fit in with Holmes’ 6 pieces of evidence as to why the libraries (and librarians!) are bound for stardom?

  1. Libraries get in fights.Yes they do. And their fights have share toolbars and twitter archives, so that everyone can join in.
  2. Librarians know stuff. And now they will use social media, as well as traditional means, to tell you about it and let you ask questions.
  3. Libraries are green and local. And they blog about being green and local.
  4. Libraries will give you things for free. Libraries WANT to give you things for free, and they can promote those free services using every available means.
  5. “Open to the public” means “some days, you really have to wonder about people.” For better or worse, many librarians share anecdotes about  serving the public in online spaces.Scott Douglas made a career out of it.
  6. There seems to be a preposterous level of goodwill. Most librarians like to share. Now they’re collaborating using wikis to make sure everyone has the best information out there.

Admittedly my tone, like Holmes’ article, is lighthearted. But I do believe that social media is allowing libraries to promote themselves in new ways, and that this is hopefully leading to greater recognition in popular culture. So bring on the “happy-fuzzy pop-culture stories.” And pass the cupcakes.

Image: “Montreal Twestival 2009 Cupcakes.” Flickr. Web. 22 July 2010. http://www.flickr.com/photos/clevercupcakes/3920802507/

Categories
Collection Services

Participatory Library Services: Patron-Driven Acquistions

One of the things we read for LIBR 559M this week was a chapter from Casey and Stavastinuk’s Library 2.0 called “Participatory Service and the Long Tail.” The chapter discussed the need for creating ways in which patrons can have a direct stake in library services, contributing to the programs and collections that are available. Some of these ideas were reflected in a paper I wrote last semester for LIBR 580: Collection Management. The paper was called “Public Displays of Affection: User-Centered Collection Development in Public Libraries,” and I wanted to share a piece of it here. Specifically, I want to mention the concept of Patron-Driven Acquistions, through which patrons interact directly with the library catalogue to select which e-books the library purchases. Although this is arguably not an instance of social media use, it is an instance of direct participation by patrons, which is one of the most significant affordances of social media in the library world. This is an example of participatory service which provides access to the long tail, similar to those discussed by Casey and Stavastinuk.

“Libraries and vendors have also developed services to complement purchase on-demand services for print materials by meeting patrons’ on-demand digital information needs through patron-driven acquisitions (PDA) of e-books. Through PDA programs, patrons are able to dictate which e-books the library purchases and access content almost instantly. Through agreements with vendors, large numbers of e-book records are loaded into the library catalogue based on an individual library profile created by the collections librarian. Users are able to browse and loan these titles, which include fiction, non-fiction, and some reference materials, and at some point the loan (after either one or more uses, depending on the library’s agreement with the vendor) will trigger an actual purchase of the e-book which is then owned directly by the library (Chadwell 72). Although patron-driven acquisitions have been available in some form for about 10 years there seems to be growing interest in the service in the last few years, with an increasing number of vendors such as NetLibrary, EBL, and Ingram Digital (Polanka 121).”

References:

Chadwell, Faye A. “What’s Next for Collection Management and Managers? User-Centered Collection Management.” Collection Management 34.1 (2009): 69-78. Library, Information Science & Technology Abstracts with Full Text. EBSCO. Web. 1 Feb. 2010.

Polanka, Sue. “Off the Shelf: Patron-Driven Acquisition.” Booklist 105.9/10 (2009): 121. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 4 Feb. 2010.

Categories
Reference Services

Reaching Out: Social Media and Reference

reaching outThe other day at work, I was talking to one of my supervisors about my work concerning social media, and she made an interesting comment that has really stuck with me. “Well, there is no one way anymore,” she told me.

Of course, we can debate the question of whether or not there ever was “one way.” But whatever side we happen to fall on, I think that this observation still has relevance. People seek out information in a wide variety of ways, and so, as librarians we need to disseminate information, whether it’s our latest programs or answers to reference questions, in multiple mediums in order to reach the largest number of users possible.

Of course, this can be very frustrating. The greater number of tools we need to use in order to reach our users, the more time it takes, and the more futile it can feel. However, this multiplicity can also be empowering, allowing us to reach more people, and in some cases, actually saving time. A few days after the conversation I had, I came across this article by Nicole Engard. In it, she describes a panel she was a part of concerning Smart Technologies. One of the speakers, Chad Boeninger, talked about using new tools to reach many people instead of just one when answering reference questions.

For example, if someone asks a question which other users might also want to know about, librarians can create a blog post or even a video (I got to use Camtasia recently and loved it. Would love to use this at work). Doing this creates the opportunity that this information will be shared more widely and even re-posted or shared in other forums.

Of course, this has its limitations – although you can certainly point patrons to a blog or online video, this isn’t the right strategy in every case. But after reading Nicole’s article, I started thinking about other ways in which social media tools can help librarians collaborate to answer reference questions more efficiently by sharing with many instead of just one. One thing I’ve been trying to improve on lately is my reader’s advisory skills, and I discovered ATN Reading Lists, a wiki where librarians collaborate to create reading lists and lists of read-alikes. I’ve also utilized my own social networks (a form of crowdsourcing, I guess) to seek information, and Twitter could also be used for this purpose.

When used appropriately, I think social media has the potential to be an important part of reference services (not a replacement for traditional services, but an addition to them). There may be no one way to provide reference information, but social media tools can certainly change some of the ways in which we  share information, and even make sharing easier.

For others out there providing reference services, has social media influenced this process for you?

Image: “Put your hand up if you are having a good time.” Flickr. Web. 15 November 2009.
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