Screencasting with Jing

I chose Jing to create my screencast, a tutorial on bookmarking in Delicious. I had no idea how much fun it would be! It's incredibly easy to use and the tutorials help you get acquainted with the tools before you dive right in. One can capture an image or create a video, and the video has the option of adding audio from a microphone. I used my Gigaware headset microphone and had no problems getting started. I did have trouble keeping within the five-minute time limit, but that had more to do with my "um's" and "uh's" than having too much material to talk about. The free version of Jing doesn't allow you to upload your video to YouTube - you need to purchase Jing Pro to do that. So rather than embed the video into this post, I will share the link.

Anyway, without further ado, here is my screencast tutorial on Delicious.

Challenges of building an active online community

Martin Reed’s blog post 20 Questions For Managers Of Online Communities touches on several challenges that one faces in creating an active online community. Since he is coming from the standpoint of an online community manager, his 20 questions cover more than mere challenges, but he does pose questions such as “How is your online community unique?” which addresses a major challenge of standing out in a crowd of other online communities. He also brings up the all-too-common challenge of “How do you deal with abusive posts/members?” Regarding this, Reed states that there is a fine line between encouraging interaction and stifling debate through excessive moderation, and stresses having a plan of being fair, neutral and professional. A third challenge posed by Reed is “Do your members trust you?”, which stresses that as manager of the online community, one needs to earn the trust of the members and not abuse that trust.

Touching on similar challenges, Andrew Cohen covers the two sides of making members feel welcomed and yet setting clear ground rules in his blog post Characteristics Of Successful Online Communities. He suggests to “establish community norms that encourage open communication rather than stifling it. Set boundaries for acceptable behavior.” He stresses ruling kindly, but firmly, and “be sure that your community has clear standards for when messages are to be deleted -- such as use of profanity, slander, breach of privacy, copyright violations, or inappropriate promotions.”

Another challenge of building an active online community is simply getting members to contribute. Martin Reed’s blog post Inside The Mind Of A Community Lurker defines a lurker as someone who has registered as a member but hasn’t contributed to the community. Reed notes that “an online community won’t be very successful if your members don’t contribute.” New members may feel intimidated, don’t know where to start, or haven’t found any topics of interest and therefore become lurkers. Ways to get new members to contribute and not become lurkers are to welcome them and ask them to introduce themselves, have a section of the community dedicated to newcomers, contact them individually to find out what topics interest them, and encourage replies and continued threads to boost new members’ confidence and comfort levels with posting. Of course, there will always be those members who simply lurk, but they are not to be underestimated. It is likely they are getting the word out about your brand beyond the confines of the online community, whether they are contributors or lurkers.

Tagging in library catalogs

Tagging can be very useful in library catalogs. Giving the public the ability to tag books and other materials in a library’s catalog provides an alternative form of organization of those materials in addition to the formal classification system set forth by the library (ie., call number). This ties into the idea of giving users the means to rate items, tag them and write reviews, which are described as forms of crowdsourcing by Aaron Tay in his blog Musings About Librarianship. Tay writes that tagging is most successful when there is a critical mass of users, such as the Library Of Congress’ collection of historical photos on Flickr. But when free tagging doesn’t get the large number of tags necessary to make the system useful, Tay describes this a failure. Tagging relies on large quantities of tags so that one can view similar items that have been tagged.

One could also point to the lack of controlled vocabulary in the tagging system, where users can tag an item with any word or phrase regardless of how others are tagging their items. This is another downside to tagging in library catalogs, where a search on the tag “sciencefiction” will not retrieve the results for items tagged “science_fiction”. Nevertheless, tagging in library catalogs seems to be in its early stages and there is certainly time for this idea to develop and improve as users catch on its features.

Online Collaboration At Work

On reading the articles for this week’s reading, I realized how little online collaboration is done at the library where I work. We’re still in the age of sending memos, procedures, schedule changes, and the like via email. It would certainly be useful to add these items to a Google Doc or wiki that everyone can access, read, and even contribute to.

One example I will elaborate on relates to the work I do in the preservation department. I am the person in charge of bindery shipments and as such, I have certain procedures that I follow for each shipment going out and each shipment that is returned from the bindery. My immediate supervisor, who has little to do with the bindery shipments specifically, will occasionally have procedural questions or will ask me about the current schedule of when a shipment is going out. It would not be too difficult to create an online document in either Google Docs or on a wiki that my supervisor (and everyone in the department for that matter) could access with the current bindery schedule and written procedures for the various bindery jobs. We have bindery procedures that were written many years ago that are saved in a Word document and are likely out of date. If those procedures were put up on a wiki, changes could be made effortlessly and for all members of the department to see.

Luis Suarez’s blog post When Wikis Won’t Work: 10 Questions To Ask Before Full Adoption is helpful in considering whether creating a wiki will work for this type of situation. The last of the ten questions, “can the team / community perform that task at hand with the same quality and participation using other tools than a wiki?” makes me reconsider the idea of creating a wiki for the bindery shipment procedures and schedule. I think the simplicity of using Google Docs wins here. The bindery procedures and schedule could be placed in a Google Doc that everyone could access and is much easier to edit and make contributions to.

If I propose the Google Docs idea to my department, my guess is a few of the seven people will embrace the idea and the others will be indifferent or noncommittal. Either way, simply introducing the concept of online collaboration will be a step forward for my department at the library.

Exercise 5

Before this class I had limited experience with using Delicious. I have an older account that I would occasionally save links to, but never even thought of tagging them in order to categorize and create some sense of order to them. This exercise was useful in getting me orientated with using tags, searching a tag to find similar links, and browsing another user’s bookmarks who has used similar tags.

When I saved my initial three bookmarks, I looked for articles and/or blog posts relating to the subject matter for this week. Two of the three bookmarks did not have any other people bookmarking it. The third link had six other people bookmarking it. As I continued to browse by tags, by one user’s name, and through the “bell246” tag for classmates’ links, I began to realize that the links with the most number of users’ bookmarks tended to be resources that users wanted to return to more than once. While I was following the weekly assignment of looking for related articles to bookmark (which I would probably only read once), many people are using Delicious to bookmark resources that they plan on using over and over, similar to using the bookmarks feature on the Firefox or Safari browsers. This explains why websites like MOG (3,567 bookmarks) and Dribbble (7,542 bookmarks) have so many bookmarks.

If only there was a way to transfer all of my Firefox and Safari bookmarks to Delicious in one fell swoop. Then I could access those bookmarks everywhere I go. Somehow I doubt there is. For now, I don’t really see myself using Delicious for extensive bookmarking like I do on Firefox. But for the occasional interesting article that I might come across at work and want to save for later reading, Delicious is a great tool.

And how about a Delicious app for the iPhone? I would certainly use it.

Social bookmarking and tagging

Social bookmarking websites such as Deli.cio.us are useful on so many levels, starting with simply bookmarking articles and web pages that one wants to remember and save. Beyond the simple act of bookmarking, tagging bookmarks can reveal a whole new level of possibilities. Tagging one’s bookmarks not only increases the personal findability of articles by topic, by opens up the “social” part of social bookmarking in that one can see who else bookmarked the same link and view that person’s bookmarks, which could be related in subject matter. As Meredith Farkas states in her text, “social bookmarking can lead to the discovery of other useful resources” (Farkas, 2007).

Exploring beyond your own bookmarks is an essential feature of social bookmarking. One can click on a tag and search across users for similarly tagged articles, or one can click on a username and browse that person’s bookmarks. Also, one can subscribe to an RSS feed of a certain tag to see what articles people are tagging with the specific term.

Some uses for social bookmarking in the library are to tag items for patrons and create subject guides. Social bookmarking subject guides can include keywords that aren’t necessarily taken from a controlled vocabulary. In Melissa Rethlefsen’s article Tags Help Make Libraries Del.icio.us, she notes that “tagging is often controversial among librarians, largely because adding keywords to resources lacks authority control” (Rethlefson, 2007). On the upside, she states that tagging “lowers barriers for participation, both for library patrons and staff,” meaning the everyday language of tags encourages participation from library users, who could even suggest links of subject keywords. “Task tagging” is another useful way to tag items for a specific purpose or audience. Academic librarians can tag specific links for specific classes, or organize links by class subject.

In all, librarians and other social bookmarking participants are still discovering the many uses of sites like Del.icio.us.

Farkas, M. (2007). Social Software In Libraries. Medford, NJ: Information Today.

Rethlefsen, M. (2007). Tags help make libraries Del.icio.us. Library Journal, 9/15/2007. Retrieved from http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6476403.html.

Marketing Critique of Online Presence: Berkeley Public Library

Berkeley Public Library (BPL) is a five-branch library system serving Berkeley, California and it’s surrounding communities. Like many public libraries of similar size, BPL maintains an interactive website that covers user interests such as location and hours, an online catalog, account access for library card holders, an events calendar, teen and children’s resources, and local Berkeley history. In addition to its very useful website, BPL expands its online presence using Web 2.0 and social tools such as blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. By doing so, BPL is acknowledging the increasing popularity of these sites and tapping into their tools in order to market the library’s services online.

One of Berkeley Public Library’s more active online presences is their Facebook page. The page currently has 1,213 people who “like” BPL’s Facebook page and can receive updates in their newsfeed. Event announcements and links to related articles are sent at a varying rate, sometimes daily and sometimes once a week. Since Facebook is currently the most visited website in the world, having an online presence there in the form of a library page is a must. BPL seems to be doing an adequate job of marketing their library events without “over-posting” every link or idea that comes their way. They are also punctual in responding to questions that come in the form of comments to their announcement postings.

Another online technology that could potentially incite one to start habitually “over-posting” is Twitter. While Berkeley Public Library is not using its presence in Twitter to tweet every instance of “what are you doing?” as some Twitter users are wont to do, they again do an adequate job of getting the word out about their events. In fact, their tweets are nearly identical to their Facebook posts, only abbreviated and with a shortened link to the actual Facebook posting. They likely have an application set up that automatically tweets an abbreviated version of every Facebook post that is sent. If so, this is an effective way of using one tool to market their events simultaneously to two different sets of followers. My only criticism of this technique is that the tweet version tends to cut off mid-sentence, which could be off-putting to their followers. However, they can always go to the Facebook link to read the full post.

Alongside the Facebook and Twitter logos on their home page is a link to Berkeley Public Library’s YouTube channel. According to their profile, BPL joined YouTube in 2007. This doesn’t appear to be a frequently used online tool since they have only uploaded 14 videos since they joined. 13 of the videos are digital stories from a series called Berkeley Public School Desegregation that were posted in March 2010. The 14^th video was posted in 2007 and presents mini-profiles of several BPL library users. YouTube is one tool that works best in tandem with another online device, such as uploading a video to YouTube and then posting the link on Facebook or embedding it into a blog. Unfortunately, judging by the low number of videos uploaded in just over three years, BPL does not appear to be using this free online presence to its fullest extent.

Another area where Berkeley Public Library’s presence is noticeably lacking is in its blog usage. BPL has two blogs that I could find: a weblog that is an additional page on its main website, and a Wordpress designed BPL Teen blog. Neither blog is updated all that frequently. The weblog’s last posting was from December 2010. BPL Teen’s most recent post was in January. Blogs are definitely an online tool that can require more time from library staff, and in this current era of budget cuts and staff shortages it is possible that staff simply don’t have the extra time to post messages to the blogs. One positive aspect is that users can subscribe to the weblog via RSS feed, though there didn’t appear to be a way to subscribe to an RSS feed from the teen blog.

If Berkeley Public Library were to consult me about their social media marketing, I would recommend bringing the activity up on all of their social media websites. More frequent posting on the blogs, Facebook, and Twitter would display to their followers an enthusiasm, pride, and commitment to the services they provide. If it is not feasible to assign just one staff member to be responsible for their online presence, I would suggest having two or three (or a team of) staff members take turns posting to the different sites. Having different “voices” and different perspectives keeps things interesting for the reader as well as for the contributors. Another suggestion would be to have weekly themes to the blog posts that return at the same time each week, such as DVD Reviews on Fridays or something to that effect. Linking their Facebook and Twitter posts is a great idea, and they could take it to the next level by posting links on to their blog posts on Facebook/Twitter, thereby achieving a trifecta in their online marketing presence. It also wouldn’t hurt to post an announcement about an event more than once, perhaps a few days in advance of the event and then a follow-up post on the day of the event. I would certainly refrain from posting the same announcement more than two or three times as it could become tiresome for the follower to read the same announcement over and over.

Additionally, Berkeley Public Library could use video more effectively in their online marketing. They could create videos that are uploaded to their YouTube channel and then linked to Facebook/Twitter or embedded into their blogs. Or, they could link to other non-BPL-created videos that have some relevance to the posts they send. Since web users and websites are visually-oriented, the use of video to get one’s message across, whether it’s playful, instructional, or educational, can serve to enhance the message.

Overall, I was pleased to find Berkeley Public Library embracing the current social media techologies that are “sweeping the nation”. But as with any marketing strategy, it always helps to look at how others are doing it to see if one’s implementation of those strategies is as effective as it could be.

To proactively reach out online

Reaching out to students in online spaces such as Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace can be both potentially touchy and a positive outreach tool for librarians. There is certainly a fine line between effectively reaching out to students (or patrons) and overstepping the boundaries of professionalism. Mack et al’s article Reaching Students With Facebook: Data and Best Practices (2007) was written when Facebook was mainly used by students, but the ideas presented for librarians can be adapted to patrons of public libraries as well.

The article stresses creating an online presence to meet the users where they are, rather than hope that they come to the library’s static web page. Creating a profile in Facebook adds a human element to the library, so that users “might begin to identify their librarians as approachable individuals” (Mack, 2007). When the article was written, Facebook did not allow entities to have profiles, only individuals, so the article is calling for librarians to create individual profiles. This has since changed and one can now create a profile for an entity such as a library. I feel this is a good thing, that a person can “like” a library’s profile and then receive updates from the library in their newsfeed. Similarly with Twitter, patrons can follow a library’s Twitter feed.

I get a little uncomfortable with the idea of librarians actually contacting patrons individually through their Facebook accounts. Facebook users tend to value their privacy and seem to enjoy having their conversations with their friends in a private space. As a future librarian, I would feel a little awkward sending individual messages to people offering reference help. On the other hand, sending out a public message via the library’s Facebook or Twitter feed with an offer for reference help and the subsequent contact information feels like a more appropriate way to go.

The proactive reaching out to the public might be less awkward on Twitter, where people are aware (I hope) that the messages they send are visible to anyone and everyone in cyberspace. If a person on Twitter tweets a reference-type question or library-related question, I think it is perfectly appropriate for a librarian to reply to the tweet and provide an answer.

Mack, D. et al (2007). Reaching students with Facebook: Data and best practices. Electronic Journal Of Academic and Special Librarianship, 8(2). Retrieved from http://southernlibrarianship.icaap.org/content/v08n02/mack_d01.html

Twitter for libraries

Kelly Dallen's article "How Your Library May Not Be Using Twitter But Should" describes very effectively how libraries can utilize this tool to their advantage. The first benefit is that it is absolutely cost-free and while there is a time investment required, with enough training and practice it could eventually take an experienced "tweeter" very little time to send out a tweet. Twitter can be used to promote events and programming in the library. It is also a good way to promote materials in the library, such as new releases, DVDs, etc.

Libraries can get creative and use their Twitter accounts to send tweets with a little humor, provide links to fun and informative articles, videos, and current events. Libraries are becoming less about providing merely books and more about providing information, and Twitter enables the librarian to do just that. Not only does it require librarians to stay on top of current technologies, it can also be used as a reference and customer service tool. Twitter provides two-way communication, some of which can happen in nearly real time. The patron who asks a question or provides feedback via Twitter can be replied to in a speedy way.

Lastly, Twitter can cultivate connections and relationships amongst fellow librarians, who can follow each other and network, collaborate, and have discussions remotely from different locations. My personal view on Twitter has completely changed after learning about it this week. I had previously thought "what's the point?" and now feel it is a social tool that can be of value to libraries that choose to explore it.

Dallen, K. (2009). How your library may not be using Twitter but should. Retrieved March 1, 2011 from http://www.kellyd.com/2009/07/29/how-your-library-may-not-be-using-twitter-but-should/

Libraries and RSS

Why should libraries care about RSS?

Last week’s exercise of following eight library blogs via RSS feed really opened my eyes to the benefits of using RSS. I had previously been dismissive of the idea of subscribing the feeds via RSS when I first learned about this tool a few years ago. As Meredith Farkas states, “RSS is a great way to keep current with your favorite blogs, journals, and news sites, consolidating all your online reading in a single place” (Farkas, 2007).

RSS can be extremely useful in libraries and for librarians. Librarians can subscribe to RSS feeds to keep track of blogs and websites for their own interest, or to use as a resource guide for their patrons. RSS can also be enabled in various areas of the library’s website so that patrons can subscribe to RSS feeds on upcoming events, library news, and new titles in the collection. At some libraries, patrons can also subscribe to feeds for a particular search, or for updates on their library account. Additionally, some electronic database vendors are offering the option to subscribe to RSS feeds of searches on the database, including subject searches or a feed of articles from a specific journal.

Seeing as how I’ve only scratched the surface of using RSS with my free and easy Google Reader, it is mind-blowing and certainly overwhelming to learn how many different uses there are for this tool. Librarians who want to keep abreast of current technology tools and trends can certainly benefit from using RSS.

Farkas, M. (2007). Social Software In Libraries. Medford, NJ: Information Today.

Blogging in this class

How do you think blogging will contribute to your learning in this class?

I have been fascinated with blogs and blogging for years and find them a creative way for just about anyone to express themselves. They provide an outlet for people to express opinions or share experiences. I’ve had a plan to start a music blog for years but haven’t been able to get it going (largely due to being in grad school!). This class is enabling me to learn the basics about blogging and get some hands-on experience writing blog posts. This will naturally help me in the future as a librarian. Library blogs are becoming much more common in public and academic libraries. The San Francisco Public Library maintains 22 blogs systemwide. In the preservation department where I work, we have discussed the idea of starting and maintaining a preservation blog and what we would post about, but it has yet to take off beyond the discussion stage. We talked about posting how-to articles about preservation treatments that we do, including pictures and maybe even embedded video. Maintaining a blog for this class is certainly a motivator in getting me interested in taking the idea of the preservation blog beyond merely the “discussion stage”.

Subscribing to eight blogs

I really enjoyed subscribing to and reading posts from the five blogs in this assignment. While they are all from a librarian’s point of view, there are distinct differences in the approach each blog follows. They are all generally written from a personal perspective, but one of them seems to be more formal in its writing than the others. In the Library with a Lead Pipe is a collaborative blog that has several bloggers and guest writers, and the writing is lengthy and reads more like academic papers with cited articles appearing at the end of each post. While the topics can be interesting, including lengthy pieces on Facebook and WikiLeaks, it is a blog that requires more investment of time to delve through the postings one at a time. 

At the opposite end of the spectrum, The Distant Librarian contains posts that are short, to the point, and very casual in their writing. Paul Pival is the sole blogger and his blog contains mainly short book reviews, and blurbs about the electronic side of librarianship such as screencasting, electronic databases, and e-books. Librarian By Day also contains posts from a sole blogger (Bobbi Newman) about the tech side of libraries, but her posts seem to be more fleshed out and contain numerous links to other articles, plus embedded videos and images that make the posts more interesting. 

The blog David Lee King is run by a librarian who posts frequently and about many different topics related to librarianship. His “Top 10 Tips To Do Presentations Like Me” is an interesting series that every librarian or librarian-to-be can learn a thing or two from. It takes a certain boldness or chutzpah to name a blog after yourself and display images of yourself on your blog, but in Mr. King’s case it comes across as more gregarious than arrogant. And after I read on his blog that he is also a musician, his outgoing approach to blogging makes more sense.

My favorite blog of the five is The Librarian’s Commute by Olivia Nellums. Her topics are all over the map, including writing about patrons, weeding, e-books, blogging, among many others. It’s not too tech-heavy, which appeals to me since I’m not a super techy person. And the simplicity with how she lays out her posts with bullets or numbers to indicate her talking points and examples is a plus. I will certainly continue to read the other four blogs but I will probably navigate over to The Librarian’s Commute more often.

The three additional blogs I subscribed to are Genre X from the Oak Park Public Library, Marin County Free Library, and Shelf Talk from Seattle Public Library.  Genre X is a blog whose subtitle is “A Twenties and Thirties Book Group”. I am no longer in my twenties or thirties but I thought I’d peek in on what the blogging staff at OPPL was recommending to readers of that age group. The blog contains mostly readers’ advisory recommendations and announcements of events that would appeal to their designated demographic, such as trivia night, holiday book swap, and a Guitar Hero competition (all great ideas, in my opinion). Marin County Free Library’s blog has more general information and announcements, such as a new Overdrive app for eBooks and audiobooks on the iPad, tax help, audiobook download of the week, and upcoming events. It’s very simply laid out with a Blogger template and very easy to read. I’ve scanned Shelf Talk years ago and I seem to recall its being mostly book reviews, but they have expanded the scope of their blog and provide information about digital downloads, movie reviews, a Question of the Month series in which the tackle a reference question and answer it, as well as the informative book reviews. 

Of the blogs that I chose to subscribe to, the ones that I found to be successful had a simple layout that was not too busy on the page, were frequently updated, expressed a personal “voice” to the writing (i.e., informal) and were not too tech-oriented. There were certain blogs that were more tech-y than others, but I found the blogs that described the technical stuff in layman’s terms were more effective.

Credo Mobile

What organization do you find inspirational in their use of social media and why?

One organization that I find inspirational in their use of social media is a company called Credo Mobile. They are a mobile phone company (formerly called Working Assets) that champions progressive causes and donates a portion of their earnings to, in their words, “social change nonprofit groups.” They are a company that is not afraid to wear their political beliefs on their sleeves and that’s part of why the company exists is to provide an alternative mobile phone company (and long distance company if people still use land lines) that one can support if one believes in the causes they champion.

Credo Mobile’s Facebook page is very active, and contains numerous posts and links to articles about what is happening in politics on a given day. Of course, these are all from the progressive point of view. A scan of recent posts on the page reveal links to an article critical of GOP members who voted to repeal health care reform, an article about the House failing to extend the Patriot Act, and an AP story that reveal President Obama has kicked his smoking habit. But what is most interesting is that there is nary a post about the company itself or newsworthy posts about what is happening in the world of Credo. They have essentially taken their Facebook page to use as an individual would use his/her own Facebook page to share articles that one finds interesting.

Credo Mobile has 53,911 fans on their Facebook page, and they provide links to the causes they support in the “Favorite Pages”, such as Planned Parenthood, Doctors Without Borders, and Amnesty International. They do have a tab called “Mobile Offers” that provides information on their mobile phone plans. But I really do admire how they take a “politics and social causes first” approach to utilizing social media. Credo Mobile also has a Twitter account, but it appears to be less active. The latest tweet was sent January 19^th.

Excercise 1: Tesla Motors

I chose to study Tesla Motors since it’s a local Bay Area company that I admire and I have a friend who works for them. As you may already know, Tesla Motors is a Palo Alto-based startup that designs and manufactures electric cars. Their first model was a two-seat sports car called the Tesla Roadster. Their follow-up will be the Model S four-door sedan, which will be available in 2012. While I have little hope of owning either of these cars anytime soon, I admire that they are a small auto company that is influencing the major auto companies to steer towards producing more electric and hybrid-electric vehicles.

A Google search of “Tesla Motors” produced many positive articles about the company from auto and technology blogs, as well as the New York Times. An article from Bizjournal posted today that shares of Tesla’s stock rose 8 percent. By the second and third Google pages I started seeing less positive articles, one about the small plane crash that killed several Tesla employees in February 2010, and a business investment article about how Tesla is still a very long way from turning a profit.

Using How Sociable, Tesla Motors’ visibility score was only a 225, which is relatively low compared to companies like Subaru (1202) and Honda (3421). Additionally, Technorati only produced 24 blog posts relating to Tesla Motors. Social Mention gives a sentiment ratio of 8:1, with the overwhelming majority of mentions (458 posts/tweets) having a neutral sentiment.

Tesla has three different Yelp pages and there are a total of 30 reviews from Yelpers on those pages combined. All of the ratings were either 4 or 5 stars (aside from two skeptics) but I had a hard time finding someone who actually owned one of their vehicles. Most of the reviews were similar to myself in their enthusiasm about the product from a distance, though only a few had actually test-driven one.

Tesla’s Facebook page has 26,645 fans and their Wall is filled with people postings pictures, links and mentions of Tesla, including one person’s status update: “I'm a little disappointed there wasn't a Tesla Motors commercial during the Super bowl yesterday. There were way too many GM ads...” It seems natural that a company’s Facebook page will accumulate more positive feedback than negative since the postings are from so-called “fans” but it that has not always been the case with every business that opens up their online presence to allow customer feedback.

 

Tesla Motors is very active in using social media to get the word out about their product. I didn’t notice them responding very often to people who are talking about them online. In a few cases they “like”d what someone posted on their wall, and they have retweeted tweets that they considered worth informing the public about on Twitter. But for the most part, Tesla seems content on touting their product through tweets, Facebook posts, a Vimeo page, and their own blog on their website. They are a relatively new company that doesn’t have a large share of people who actually use their product; they only recently reached the 1,500 mark of Tesla Roadsters sold. They are more or less riding high on the love people have for sports cars and/or (the concept of) electric vehicles or both. In many ways, they are still in their “buzz” stage since there are more people that know about the product than actually use the product. Because of this there is not as much of a need to actively engage their customers online. However, there may come a time when Tesla is not feeling the “love” as fervently from the public as they currently are, and it would behoove them to utilize their social media tools (Twitter, Facebook) to build connections with the public more directly and give back some of the “love”.

The Concept of Library 2.0

I really like Sarah Houghton’s definition of Library 2.0, especially “more interactive, collaborative, and driven by community needs.” I also recognize how important it is to, as she describes, “get people back into the library by making the library relevant to what they want and need in their daily lives.” I have countless friends and acquaintances that simply don’t make use of their local libraries. When I talk to them about it, they say agreeably, “yeah, I should check it out.”

To me, Library 2.0 has a lot to do with making the library more interactive and opening it up to ideas that haven’t been done before. Like the blyberg.net article says, “L2 challenges library orthodoxy on almost every level.” By opening up a library’s website to comments, feedback, ratings, and reviews, providing downloadable materials from the comfort of one’s home, providing a gaming night in an allocated space in the library, and reaching out to tech savvy users via social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, as well as blogs, Library 2.0 concepts are increasingly becoming more common in libraries. And while the argument exists that much of the technology is costly, many of these features that are available are absolutely cost-free.

If there is proof that the concept of Library 2.0 is increasing, it is evident in the location where I work. I handle bindery shipments of periodicals that are bound into volumes and shelved in the Main Library for users to peruse. Every year an increasing number of periodicals are being canceled (subscriptions for physical copies) in favor of online databases that provide electronic versions of the same periodicals, which can then be accessed remotely by users from their homes or library computers. In this sense, the library is fulfilling a need for access to library materials from outside the library. Sure, there will still be users who come into the library to read the physical copies of newspapers and magazines, but this service of providing remote access to materials is another way of recognizing “community needs.”

Inaugural Post

Hi everyone. I'm Dave Power and this is my first post for the LIBR 246 Web 2.0 class. About me: I live in the East Bay with my awesome wife and two kids, and work full time at San Francisco Public Library in the Preservation Department. At SFPL I am in charge of the commercial bindery shipments and also do some basic book repair. It's a great place to work! While my job and family keep me very busy, I also manage to do grad school part-time and am nearing the end of my studies at SJSU/SLIS.

I've only dabbled in blogging sporadically, but look forward to exploring it further as the class progresses. I don't consider myself all that tech-savvy, but I'm excited to learn about all the new technologies related to Web 2.0 and Library 2.0. I hope I can keep up!