Facebook in Libraries

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I just finished reading Balancing Outreach and Privacy in Facebook in which the author, Peter Fernandez, makes some very interesting points.

Point#1: It's all about the tone. I think this is an important point when discussing all social media. How do you create posts with an informal, yet professional tone?

Point#2: Regulating speech. Fernandez makes an excellent point when discussing the need for each library staff to set up policies and procedures regarding hate speech or false information posted onto the library's Facebook page. Once again, this point is essential when discussing all social media.

Point#3: Keep open privacy settings. You want to protect the library and it's patrons, but not at the expense of no one finding you online.

Point#4: Maintenance. Just with blogging and tweeting, it's so important for libraries to have a schedule of posts and someone in charge of posting.

Those were some of the ideas I gleaned from the article. How about you? What did you think of this article? Did I miss anything?

Fernandez, Peter, "Balancing Outreach and Privacy in Facebook: Five Guiding Decisions Points" (2009). Library Publications and
Other Works. http://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_libfpubs/11

Features That I Love on Next Generation Catalogs

1. The "Google"-like search bar: Making things easier for a quick keyword search, most catalogs have a single search bar that makes the interface easier for librarian and patron alike.

2. Advanced Search option: When you have plenty of information and want stellar results, advanced search is the way to go.

3. Facets: Ahhh, facet navigation is the butter to the catalog's bread. Easily limit your search parameters by location, language, or subject term.

4. "Did you mean...?": For the patron (or librarian!) who is not sure how to spell a specific term or author's name, there is a solution (though sometimes not the best help).

5. Subject Headings: The ability for patrons and librarians to find more resources through the use of subject heading links at the bottom of the individual item records makes subject browsing easier.

Those are just a few qualities that I like regarding Next-Generation Catalogs. What do you like?

Why I chose Twitter for my Book Review

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For my book review, I chose Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. Blink is about the brain's ability to 'thin slice', taking meaning from small portions of important information. I chose Twitter to communicate my book review because it is the social media that is a constant stream of thin slices, 140 characters to get your point across, 140 characters in which to get the gist of what someone is trying to communicate. This is thin slicing at it's core and hopefully I will be able to communicate through these thin slices the main idea of this book.

Check out my book review at #blinkreview!!

How I used Del.icio.us to solve a problem

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I learned about del.icio.us last year when I completed a paper on the use of natural language tagging in academic libraries. I opened an account and explored the uses of social bookmarking but couldn't figure out a way to incorporate it into my work environment.

Until one day, we decided to work on decreasing the amount of paper used in the department. Part of my job in the Acquisitions Department is to sort through and file publisher catalogs. The catalogs are available for librarians and faculty to examine and request items for the library to purchase. It's an overwhelming job because there are so many catalogs and they need to constantly be sorted and weeded. To make life easier, we bookmarked all the publisher sites as favorites on one of the computers in the department. That way when a faculty member or librarian wanted to look at catalogs all they had to do was sit at the computer and peruse the publisher websites.

This worked great until the computer crashed and we couldn't recover the 250 publisher websites that we had saved as favorites. Instead of looking them up and saving them to one computer again, I opened a del.icio.us account for the department and bookmarked all the publisher websites within our account. I also added tags to denote what disciplines the publisher covered to help for easy searching. Faculty can also use the del.icio.us account in the comfort of their own office or home. They just need to call the department and get the log in information. Then they are free to look at the websites and email the department with recommendations.

So that's my story on del.icio.us. How about you? How do you use del.icio.us??

Professional Twitter Feeds

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Here are some of the twitter feeds I recommend:

1. Library of Congress @librarycongress

2. American Library Association @ ALALibrary

3. atyourlibrary@AtYourLibrary

4. ACRL @ALA_ACRL

5. Library Journal @LibraryJournal

Who do you recommend??