Librarians, like social workers and ethnographers, have long understood that two-way communication with their patrons is the best research they can do to develop new services and improve current ones. As my reference professor and mentor, the late Allen Smith used to say, if you’re the public librarian and “the guys at the fire department don’t know who you are, then you aren’t doing your job.” Community organizers have learned through experience that the only way to get buy-in = acceptance = use of a new service to the community, is by engaging them in every step of the process from ideation through implementation and evaluation. Otherwise it is often viewed with skepticism or, at worst, an imposition.

Students at academic institutions and corporate executives may not want to be involved with all the nitty gritty of service development, but they can still participate. Options like user-generated tags are familiar technology to students that may help them find what they need in the way they are accustomed to looking for it. Some libraries (though not all) have seen success with instant messaging reference service.

The principal mentioned as one of Library 2.0 that I think has always been around but that we still need practice with is the frequent evaluation and willingness to change or replace an unsuccessful or outmoded project or service. At my library, there is a strong push for evaluation of services and there is some sense that our less valued services may be changed or replaced. It is often difficult due to personal attachment to particular ideas, or because it is sometimes hard to tell how long an idea would need to catch on before it can be determined to have been less than successful.

The library I work for has been experimenting for some time with new technologies and continues to try new things. For example, we recently subscribed to LibGuides, which we plan to use for our subject pages (pages which highlight print, digital and human (such as professional organization) resources for a particular subject area). We have experimented with Instant Messaging, but currently it seems most effective when used between library staff members rather than between librarians and students. We are developing a collection of podcasts and video tutorials so that students can get the information they need, when they need it.

It is difficult to develop security that allows for collaboration but still maintains integrity on an online resource. At work we often place our resources behind electronic certificates which require authentication as a current student, staff or faculty member. However, some of our social software, for example, the libraries news WordPress blog, had to have comments turned off because they were all spam. (The fact that they were all or nearly all spam does seem to indicate the legitimate users weren’t going to comment anyway.)

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Answers to the Discovery section:

1. Rising blog posts by attention

I probably spent too much time watching the videos and reading the posts. Social bookmarking isn’t new or confusing to me and I didn’t need the introduction. I thought maybe there was something new that I would learn, but that didn’t turn out to be the case.

Further reflections:

Tags definitely help to organize bookmarks. Still, when I look at that big list there that isn’t organized by anything other than the date I entered it, it can look a little messy. So it takes some adjustment in how you think about what organized looks like. I guess that’s a disadvantage. I’d like to be able to physically sort them a little bit, just to help clear up the space a little. I use this professionally, but I think if I could physically put things in locations so that I could see them all together the way I want, it would be more helpful.

I also created an account in Bloglines. I’m trying to decide whether I should have separate work and personal news readers or use one for both. I’m curious to find out what, if any, difference there is between blog readers and rss feed readers. I have some guesses.

The blog aggregator links were fun. (Technorati, Bloglines top 100, Truth Laid Bear, etc.) There were several blogs worth keeping up with that I hadn’t seen before. Okay, now I need to see about this registering with BlogCentral business.