I will admit that I use Facebook for a lot of things: messaging, stalking, and checking up on social activities. But, I’ve found my ability to collaborate with fellow MLIS students hampered by one thing: non-MLIS students. Yes, I respect everyone’s opinions and value input…but sometimes I really am only trying to connect and create with a certain group of people.
In the Ellison and Weber presentation, it is argued that SNS enable better remote collaboration. Let’s focus on two areas that support collaboration: Context Awareness and Identifying Expertise.
Context Awareness
When knowledge seeking (via Facebook posts and status updates), I always try to be as specific as possible. I’m trying to provide context. If I were just querying SLAIS friends I could be very non-specific and probably still get some good results. But, by over contextualizing a question, my hope is that people who don’t have useful or helpful information won’t comment. It feels a bit ridiculous to preface a post by saying, “Hey those of you in iSchool…” or “Other MLIS candidates…,” but this context usually stops other groups of people from commenting…usually.
Identifying Expertise
Something that frequently irks me is people not really knowing what I study in library school. My sister has a running joke that I am majoring in the Dewey Decimal System. I have a running joke that she’s being a stupid-head and I’m telling Mom. Something that bothers me more is people self-identifying as experts (in the field in which I study and work and see my future) and offering unsolicited advice and news.
I get a fair number of posts from well-meaning people about some break through they’ve had about information or libraries. Sometimes these are real scholarly works, but quite frequently they are tiny tidbits of which I am already aware. Because, dear Facebook friend, my field really is a thing and I really do study it. I feel like my friends getting MBAs don’t receive messages like this:
Yes I get that things like digital literacy, information-seeking, and intellectual freedom may be new and exciting terms for you to throw around. But believe me, I’ve looked into it.
Great post Paige! In regards to the pasts about identifying expertise, I wonder if your experiences (and mine, as I have had similar ones) are related to people not really understanding the types of expertise that’s needed to be a librarian. Personally, I have encountered many people who are shocked when they hear I am a Master’s student in Library and Information Studies. More often than not, they will reply with “You need a master’s degree to be a librarian?!?” There seems to be a common perception that librarianship involves nothing more than sitting behind a reference desk and pointing people towards shelves of books, and it seems like lots of people assume that librarians spend their days checking in and out books and re-shelving them. Since these tasks do not seem to take much skill, and these are the tasks often associated with being a librarian, I think that there are many people out there who think that librarians don’t have any particular expertise.