MLA Week 3 - Social Networking

Woo hoo! I finally revisit some of the sites I joined long ago and am only finally starting to see people I'd actually want to keep tabs on joining! I was asked to join LinkedIn awhile ago by someone at an IA conference and it was well over a year before anyone else I knew was there. Then the library community found it and all of a sudden its taking off (well, for me).

MLA and Social Networking

MLA could definitely use social networking to connect to members as you have an institution, events and members. Plus there are interest groups within MLA that would lend themselves well to it. It probably wouldn't work as a replacement for the more formal means of connecting/communicating but as a great supplement. Due to the faster mutation factor in online communities MLA would do well to use them as idea generators/incubators and sounding boards. Sort of like virtual petri dishes for studying its membership and finding out what they want in a faster, more honest way than before. Not sure if they're as good for any sort of official business. But my perspective is warped - I suspect there's tremendous administrative overhead in MLA as in many organizations. At some point the social networks might surpass the more traditional ones and those will be used more as a backup. Kind of like meeting minutes and agendas - most of the interesting stuff takes place faster and outside those boundaries, but they help anchor people's memories and keep them on track. In theory.

Facebook or MySpace

Our library is interested in a presence on Facebook though we're probably going to avoid MySpace. We're a health sciences library, academic institution and demographically MySpace just trends a little too young. Facebook seems to have more of a academic cachet and we're very interested in the idea of making sure people can find us wherever they are, plus we're very into the idea of modularity and building tools/widgets to scatter across the intertubes (but in a tasteful and non-pushy way). We wouldn't mind largely blowing away our library website and replacing portions of it with such widgets, but we'll probably continue even lesser used parts of it for the "web traditionalists". Plus you can only do so much with widget-y applications currently and we can do lots more on our site/server. I personally hope we avoid using Facebook to promote or try to appear hip, but being there for people to find us and connect with would be fab.

Privacy Concerns

Yes, absolutely there are privacy concerns with these sites. By the same token there's also the potential for a more explicit agreement between the users and the administrators of these sites. That is, it can be difficult to find out what the bank or store you have a credit card with does with your information and you have to do all the work - usually when you sign up with an online service they tell you that upfront, notify you of changes and let you change your preferences or even delete your account at will. So there is a balance between the old and the new. The ability to make copies and remotely access data does make the online scarier though. Not to mention the old "well, Facebook says they'll honor the covenant with you but George Bush just signed an executive order making them give up the data and we can't control what they'll do with it - sorry!" (or the Facebook gets bought out by Rupert Murdoch). I used to be a huge privacy fundamentalist but am now more in the David Brin camp - the problem is I'm willing to be more open with my info than I used to be but I see the people who have access to it moving in the opposite direction which bothers me. I guess any site I get into an agreement with voluntarily its my choice, my problem if it goes bad. But what happens when my information gets hoovered up by people who I don't have an agreement with?

Likes and Dislikes

Well, MySpace has always made my eyes bleed and ears hurt. That continues, but makes sense as its roots are in promoting bands to fans. And I'm even a big music fan but sheesh! Its been hit with the ugly stick repeatedly. And just a little too far out of my age group. FaceBook I like because of the ability to build applications in, the different feeds to keep up with folks, etc. What I don't like is that so much of the content just seems so silly! Write on my wall, throw an elf at me, follow me around like a stalker - seems silly and narcissistic. Why would I want to do that? And I'm a really silly person! Seems like there's a lonely hearts club or boredom element to it all. Perhaps this is the accelerated MTV jump cut generation version of that. Actually I think one part may be introversion/extroversion but as explained by someone in my psych undergrad days - introverts already have high internal stimulation and find much more to be painful, while extroverts need some external stimulation to get up to a comfortable level. As an introvert I find it a little noisy and overwhelming, much as I prefer small groups of close friends and dark, divey pubs to loud, crowded nightclubs. So perhaps the thing for people like me is not mega-sites like Facebook but more dark, hidden corners created around more closely shared interests. These can be set up in Google Groups or the like, but not sure how you'd scale from mega-site to smaller, more intimate site. That may be Second Life territory...

Overall it seems to me (curmudgeon that I am) that just being connected by computer doesn't make a community, but you can use the computer and connection to enhance and expand your existing communities. I find that in person as well - just because I like X doesn't mean I'll hit it off with other people who like X :-)

MLA Week 2.0 - Blogs and Wikis

Blogs and Wikis are both fairly easy to use content management systems, so they allow people who don't know HTML or do much web development to create usable web resources and share them widely, as well as to collaborate with far more people than they could if working only locally.

Blogs seem better suited to things like news and discussions - where you write chunks of text and have a few images, links or media files embedded in them to liven things up. Being reverse chronological in order they make sense for current awareness sorts of things but aren't necessarily a good way to organze things. Good for capturing ideas or information quickly, then perhaps mining it for the ability to link to it or just refresh your memory later (esp. if you combine your posts with tags). Its also perfect for discussions, as comments are attached to posts and you can comment on a post or a comment.

Wikis, by contrast, seem better suited for things like shared resource listings and the ability to create web pages rather than web page based discussions. Because you can edit the whole page you have more flexibility than you do with a blog, with the caveat that to do much more than basic formatting you'd need to know HTML pretty well and be working at a site that doesn't lock down what code you can use - if the wiki doesn't work well enough for your needs you might be just as well to get web hosting and create pages that way. Wikis also have ability to have discussions though the formatting is closer to a chat room than a discussion, so most wikis I've seen don't have much, if any, discussion there.

Blogs and Wikis can be used in really creative ways and I've seen people do all sorts of things with them. Intranets are actually one use that looks like it may work well (its hard to know without actually being involved with a project whether it actually works for its audience or just looks like it does, or doesn't for that matter). They both allow for sharing of editing (though earlier in blog history they were mostly sole proprietorships they seem to have become more of a community thing - among the posters and the commenters), they both allow linking and both have WYSIWYG interfaces so they're good for people who don't want to get into the HTML angle, as well as people who don't have the support to do web development for financial or security reasons.

I've gotta say I'm a little jealous when I see some of the great stuff out there people have done and wonder why sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. I think that often its not the tool but the people, and some of these great projects must have great teams of people behind them - high tech or low tech, its more the people than the tech :-)

My first MLA blog post - RSS Feeds!

How could we use RSS feeds at our library? Good question! Here's stuff we're doing currently:

• Tables of contents for journals we subscribe to
• News about library classes and events
• Pulling in news feeds for certain subject areas
• New books in our collection
• Current awareness internally (esp. library tech blogs) for our staff

In the future I think we could add to this:

• Canned PubMed or other searches for subject areas in portal/subject guide pages
• Feeds for local resources of interest like new videos captured in our building (the IME Video Library - http://videos.med.wisc.edu)
• Mashups of feeds using tools like Yahoo Pipes
• Selected posts from other feeds using something like Google Reader's favorites function

Our patrons could use feeds in some similar ways and some different ways:

• The table of contents would be the same, for example, and a no-brainer
• Canned searches of specific interest to them would be very valuable (and not of much use on a shared library web page most likely)
• Feeds from health sciences blogs (esp. clinical) could be useful and efficient - current awareness for them and for us would have some overlap but would largely be different (same technique, different content)
• Feed Mashups could be mixed and matched in any number of idiosyncratic ways, so patrons could in theory get whatever they wanted