Archive for the ‘Advocacy & Promotion’ Category

The Library of Congress has issued both a full and a summary report of the pilot project it launched with Flickr in January 2008.

“Two collections of historical photographs were made public on a Library account on the Flickr photosharing site in January 2008. The response from Flickr members and observers of the pilot was overwhelmingly positive and beneficial. The following statistics attest to the popularity and impact of the pilot:

• As of October 23, 2008, there have been 10.4 million views of the photos on Flickr.
• 79% of the 4,615 photos have been made a “favorite” (i.e., are incorporated into personal Flickr collections).
• Over 15,000 Flickr members have chosen to make the Library of Congress a “contact,” creating a photostream of Library images on their own accounts.
• For Bain images placed on Flickr, views/downloads rose approximately 60% for the period January-May 2008, compared to the same time period in 2007. Views/downloads of FSA/OWI image files placed on Flickr rose approximately 13%.
• 7,166 comments were left on 2,873 photos by 2,562 unique Flickr accounts.
• 67,176 tags were added by 2,518 unique Flickr accounts.
• 4,548 of the 4,615 photos have at least one community-provided tag.
• Less than 25 instances of user-generated content were removed as inappropriate.
• More than 500 Prints and Photographs Online Catalog (PPOC) records have been enhanced with new information provided by the Flickr Community.
• Average monthly visits to all PPOC Web pages rose 20% over the five month period of January-May 2008, compared to the same period in 2007.”

via Open Education News

I am very excited to let everyone know about the latest project I’ve been working on in addition to iLibrarian called The Tech Set: Practical Guides to New Tech for Librarians. It’s a new series of books which I’ve been developing with Neal-Schuman Publishers that will be a collection of comprehensive, how-to guides for effectively using technology in libraries. I will be editing the series and I am currently looking for an author for one of the titles called Effective Blogging for Libraries. This will be a practical primer on how to successfully blog from a library’s perspective, here’s the description of the book:

“Nowadays it seems as if everyone has their own blog – but how many of them are effective? Learn how to create a go-to resource for your library patrons with this all-in-one guide to successful blogging. This complete how-to guide book provides practical tips and best practices for creating a winning library blog and informs readers about everything from blog posting techniques, strategies for encouraging comments, and dealing with negative feedback, to effective tagging. The book tackles strategies for blog marketing, transparency and authenticity, managing staff bloggers, usability guidelines, and a variety of assessment methods.”

If you’re a librarian who is knowledgeable about library blogging and has writing experience, please contact me for further details. Here’s a bit more about the series:

The Tech Set book series is a collection of comprehensive, how-to guides for effectively using technology in libraries. Each book in The Tech Set tackles a new and innovative technology type and provides an A-Z primer to let librarians hit the ground running. Written by the field’s hottest tech gurus and packed with practical instructions and advice covering everything from planning and development to marketing and metrics, each title is a one-stop passport to an emerging technology. If you’re ready to start creating, collaborating, connecting, and communicating through cutting-edge tools and techniques, you’ll want to get primed by the Tech Set. Through this series you will learn:
• How to use the latest, cutting-edge technologies
• How to plan for and develop library implementations of these popular applications
• How to utilize the social marketing techniques used by info pros
• How to measure your success with these new technologies
• How to follow best practices already established by innovators and libraries using these technologies

Over 100 organizations in 20 different countries have signed up and committed to participate in the first ever Open Access Day which will take place next week on Tuesday, October 14. Founded by SPARC, Students for FreeCulture and PLoS, Open Access Day will help broaden awareness of Open Access issues “including recent mandates and emerging policies, within the international higher education community and the general public.”

via Open Education News

Chris Brogan discusses 50 Ways Marketers Can use Social Media to Improve Their Marketing. Right away he raises a good point - it “isn’t always the right tool for the job”, and while organizations may not want to implement all of his recommendations, this article is an excellent primer. Here are his top five suggestions:

1. Add social bookmark links to your most important web pages and/or blog posts to improve sharing.
2. Build blogs and teach conversational marketing and business relationship building techniques.
3. For every video project purchased, ensure there’s an embeddable web version for improved sharing.
4. Learn how tagging and other metadata improve your ability to search and measure the spread of information.
5. Create informational podcasts about a product’s overall space, not just the product.

Brogan lists his recommendations in no particular order, however, Jeremiah Owyang, Sr Analyst at Forrester, has taken the list and segmented it by objective to add some helpful organization. These are his objectives:

• Listening: Gleaning market and customer insight and intelligence
• Talking: Engaging in a two way discussion to get your message out (and get messages in)
• Energizing: Letting your customers tell your prospects on your behalf (viral, word of mouth)
• Supporting: Getting your customers to self-support each other
• Embracing: Building better products and services through collaboration with clients
• Strategy, Training, and Planning

Web 2.0 is on everyone’s lips. It isn’t really necessary anymore to explain it, there are a lot of more or less compact definitions.

This development redefines the position of libraries in the information society. Libraries are no longer just mediators of information literacy but also of media literacy. As a result they have to deal with technical innovations and their influences on the daily librarian affairs and they have to rise to the new challenges.

This is just why Infobib team used the World Book and Copyright Day as an opportunity to start an experiment - LibWorld.

The idea was to call bloggers from all over the world to give a review about the biblioblogosphere in their country and to post these guest articles in regular intervals at Infobib.

Libworld is a series of postings in which guest authors introduce the library and library related blogs of their particular country. It started on the World Book and Copyright Day on 23rd of April, 2007.

If you don’t see your home country in the list why not consider writing an article about your country’s biblioblogosphere.

“(Federal Judge Richard) Posner . . . speculates on how the Internet and other relatively new technologies will shape the future of plagiarism. He takes the counterintuitive position that plagiarism will become much harder to get away with. In fact, ’student plagiarism may be becoming less common as more colleges and universities adopt plagiarism-detection software,’ such as Turnitin (pronounced “turn it in”), an online service several thousand colleges use.”

Read the review of The Little Book of Plagiarism, by Richard A Posner at the New Atlantis.

Find many more reviews from the Critical Compendium - a daily dose of book reviews from around the world. Pretty neat! A good service addition from your library today?

Is it time for you, your team or your library organization to move beyond a Vision or Mission Statement to a compelling design of your future? The famous Goethe quote says it all: “Whatever you can do or dream you can do, begin it now. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.”

Strategic intent is an approach that I am becoming all to familiar with within my organisation. It it believed that an organisation exhibits STRATEGIC INTENT when it relentlessly pursues a certain long-term strategic objective and concentrates its strategic actions on achieving that objective. Grand words indeed! In my organisation the dialogue around what is needed to ‘build capability’ for library services is positively embryonic - but developing nevertheless.

Great care is needed to evolve libraries using the lexicon of business. Fortunately there are many models and opportunities for us to ‘build capacity’ by learning and sharing through social networking.

Building the Ubiquitous Library in the 21st Century from the World Library and Information congress in August 2006 provides a “road map” for information professionals to utilize emerging technologies to “design, develop, integrate, enhance and implement ubiquitous library services and projects in the 21st century”.

Is todays library the new mall discusses how emerging technologies and the change in how we think about learning is driving library design that engage library users in more experiential learning environments.

Announcing the Computers in Libraries 2008 Conference.

Libraries are at the forefront of experimenting with and adopting new technology. New tools and processes have ignited creative content mashups, specialized and personalized services for community segments, and exciting new techniques for dealing with voluminous information flows. Now user generated content in conjunction with new tools is shaping the new information world. What new horizons will we find with the integration of “high tech and high touch”? What innovation and change will 2008 bring?

The conference theme Innovative Change: Integrating High Tech with High Touch, focuses on how libraries excel when technology advancements match the people capabilities. It highlights leading edge online initiatives and innovations in all types of information enterprises, tools and techniques for enhancing user-friendly digital information flows, information discovery and visualization methods for dealing with today’s information overload, building new communities and supporting online connections in engaging ways, and more.

Call for speakers is now open. Submit a proposal by August 24, 2007. You’ll find the Computers in Libraries 2008 group on FaceBook.

Thanks to Rhonda Gonzales @ the library, who writes about Blogs as Websites for libraries.

What she offers is an introduction to an OPAC which presents information with TAGS and comments - just like a blog - while still incorporating bibliographic data. This is taxonomy with a folksonomy ‘look and feel’. A most interesting development.

One of the most impressive is Plymouth State University’s Lamson Library. Take a look at their beta site: http://lamson.wpopac.com/library. If you do a catalog search, the results are posted to the site like blog postings complete with comments. You can also browse the catalog or the whole site by drilling down through categories, etc.

This site is built on a product called Scriblio (formerly WPopac) which describes itself as “Scriblio (formerly WPopac) - an award winning, free, open- source CMS and OPAC with faceted searching and browsing features based on WordPress“. Scriblio is not available for general use at the present, but learn more about it at About Scriblio.

[From:FIKSZ.3 NDRGRND]

Keith Stanger must be a great Library Guy!! But seriously, it is well worth visiting Keith’s ‘home port’ at Information Advocate: Your Guide to Navigating Information Clutter.

What I particularly like about Keith’s approach is the way he provides access to information sources with visual mapping. Visit any of the Resources:Suggested Indexes at Halle Library and you will see exactly what I mean.

Fantastic combination of information literacy with a mind-mapping approach to information services.

Library ELF, is a free third-party service to receive email notices for due, coming due, holds, and overdue materials. You can also consolidate all family library cards on one handy email notice. Have your Library barcode and pin number ready and sign up today!

Check the Library ELF website to see if your country or region is available for this service.

[From: Yarra Plenty Library Blog and Lansing Public Library Tools and Resources]