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.