Wallflower at the party?

How social are librarians? Are we the life and soul of the party or do we hide in the corner? I am really thinking about our role in social media initiatives. SINTO has recently run events on Social Computing covering wikis and blogs and we will be running a follow up seminar on tagging, social bookmarking and social networking. There is a great deal of interest in these subjects but are there any role models out there?
Information World Review recently featured two bloggers who asked the same question and provide a model. Stephen Dale, a knowledge and information expert at the Improvement & development Agency writes a blog called Dissident. The aim of this is "Introducing Social media tools and 3rd generation knowledge management techniques into local government. Tackling the silo working practices and resistance to change that contribute to inefficiencies in the public sector" In a recent post he asked why librarians weren't taking a higher profile in promoting tagging and social bookmarking?
The Business of Knowing is a blog from Helen Nicol who lives in Sheffield and works in Leeds. Her main area of interest is Enterprise 2.0 - how social computing can help businesses. She recently drew attention to the impact of blogging on offline relationships. "I've noticed recently that my involvement in blogging, particularly internally, is having a real, positive impact on my face to face work relationships... We've connected on a level that has increased the degree to which we share knowledge and experience, the degree to which we collaborate. This isn't necessarily on a blog, it's because of a blog."
Clearly the situation is different in the different sectors. Many academic librarians have embraced blogs and other social network tools and are promoting tagging etc as part of information literacy training. I expect that they are also developing offline relationships with academics in their organisations.
In public libraries the situation is more difficult. Librarians are only just beginning to embrace web 2.0 technologies and local authorities are less eager to embrace or encourage these technologies as Stephen Dale points out. Also there is a different relationship between the librarian and their users and the librarian and their colleagues in the authority. I suspect that there are few local authorities where the library service and library staff are seen as being central to the operation and success of the authority. It is a valuable service to the public and part of cultural services but not always a resource for the organisation. In this context it is hard to think of examples of librarians & information professionals using internal blogs to develop better face to face relationships in the way described by Helen Nicol.
Librarians often complain that their role is not recognised and that they don't have a dynamic image but like the wallflower at the party the answer is to get up and circulate. And perhaps one day local government will have the Enterprise 2.0 tools that businesses are adopting.

SINTO wiki

I have to confess that I can't claim that this image is relevant to librarianship in South Yorkshire! It is a piece of sculpture in a quarry on the coast of Jersey.

We ran a repeat of the Social Computing course yesterday and I was inspired to try including some pictures on my blog. Sheila Webber in her Information Literacy blog always includes photos of flowers so I thought I would try the same.

The SINTO wiki continues to be developed. I have updated the page for Social Computing and added a page about library blogs. I have also created a page for School Librarians. With these and the other wiki pages I hope that people will add their own material.

Since the wiki was set up in March there has been an average of 28 visitors every week. Anyone can post a comment on the wiki (as with this blog) but users are also invited to register with the site. You can then become a Registered User or a Writer which gives you the ability to add new pages and edit existing pages. This of course is the whol point of a wiki - it is a community web site to which any member of the community can contribute.

This may be a difficult concept for librarians to accept! It's not just that the technology is new. A role of librarians is to preserve documents, whether they are books or websites. We don't like it when users add comments or make changes in library books and we are suspicious of Wikipedia where there is no permanence or authority for entries. The idea that a website can be changed and rewritten by anyone ( at least anyone in a defined community) goes against our instincts.

The benefits I hope are obvious. Expertise is spread throughout the SINTO community and it should be shared. I would like you all to see yourselves as part of a community that extends outside your own library. I hope you will contribute and will encourage your colleagues to do the same.

Brian Kelly - an apology :-)

My apologies to Brian Kelly who I called Brian Ferry in yesterday's post. It may have been because Mr Ferry, late of Roxy Music, was in the news for admiring Nazi iconography but it is probably just that I hit the wrong key. Anyway, to make amends I will give another plug to UK Web Focus. I mentioned his blog from the Museums and the Web 2007 conference yesterday and he has hosted a guest blog on library blogging. Apart from that there are lots of useful references to new developments with Web 2.0 so it's worth getting a feed.

Library blogs

Yesterday I posted a comment to a Guest post by Roddy MacLeod on the UK Web Focus blog about UK Library Blogs - what do we think we are doing? I explained briefly what I think I am doing with the SINTO blog. Roddy's post and the other comments make some interesting points about blogs and what they are achieving with the emphasis on academic library blogs. Most library blogs have been set up for the same reason as this blog - the technology is there and it seems to have a potential for marketing the service so why not suck it and see! Blogs are not the whole answer to the problem of how we keep our users informed of what we have to offer but they are part of a package of solutions.

The point was made that many students (and I suspect many librarians) are not familiar with RSS as a way of keeping track of a number of blogs. This was covered in our Social Computing course and will be covered again when this course is run again in May. I have recently subscribed to Bloglines for my RSS feeds and the concept works. I can quickly pick up on who is saying what in my field of interest. For more details look at the social computing page mentioned above.

A Mixed bag

Devastating news in the Guardian yesterday that several of my fellow bloggers such as Gillian Anderson, Barbra Streisland and Mariah Carey are not keeping their blogs up-to-date and may be loosing interest altogether. So if you have migrated to this Sintoblog looking for consistency I can assure you that I am in for the long haul! And following my earlier musings about whether anyone was reading this I had lots of comments (well three to be exact) encouraging me to continue and not worry too much if no one responded.

A celebrity blog that is staying the course is that of incoming CILIP President Ian Snowley Ian has been keeping a blog for some time - his 100th posting was in January 2006 - and as the new President of our professional association there should be some interesting professional postings. Ian's blog is more personal than my SINTO blog but I am working on that. (Toast and LIME marmalade for breakfast this morning). His latest posting begins "I hadn't planned to post from China, but I'm here in Beijing with an internet connection in the room, so I thought I would!" Now that is just showing off Ian! My readers in Beijing might like to know that it was quite foggy this morning in Sheffield.

The plagiarism for librarians course which was due to run yesterday was cancelled because of lack of demand but the Plagiarism Information Service did run a course in the morning for FE colleges and one librarian did attend that. I will be putting up a copy of the presentation and other information on the SINTO wiki.

I attended a meeting of the MLA Yorkshire Workforce Development Group on Monday. The purpose of the group is to “act as a strategic body focused on addressing the challenge of the sector which is to enable museums, libraries and archives to be learning organisations which develop a motivated appropriately skilled, diverse and outward-looking workforce capable of delivering high-quality services to all users.” I plan to put some information about workforce development on the wiki (and see my previous blog postings).

I have for some time been producing a Business Information Newsletter which I circulate to SINTO members on a regular basis. The latest issue is due out soon but you might like to note the following item from Sue Sayles of Sheffield Libraries.

I would be glad if you would put details of the next Sheffield Inventors'
Group meeting in your e-newsletters.
Its a joint meeting for April/May.
Monday 23 April 2007, at the Central Library,Sheffield, 6pm-7.45pm. Meet in the entrance foyer Speakers will be David Thomas and Aldo de Leonibus of Inventya on "Product to the Marketplace"
There is also the opportunity to network with other inventors and talk with business and patent information providers.

To book a free place at the meeting, email businessandtech.library@sheffield.gov.uk or telephone 0114 274 4743
From June the meetings of the Sheffield Inventors' Group will revert back to the first Monday in each month.

Blogging

A recent report suggested that nearly 50% of teenagers write a blog but you have to wonder who (if anyone) is reading them - which is exactly what I was wondering about Sintoblog. Neither the blog or the wiki are attracting much in the way of comments and I was beginning to think they were the great unread . However the site meter on the wiki records 20 visits last week (not counting my own) and a couple of people have told me recently that they have read my blog and found it useful so I will continue for the time being.

Nicholas Carr in today's Technology Guardian writes about how bloggers are seen as parasites i.e. they don't create new content but just recirculate material they pick up from other sources. To some extent that is exactly what I am doing although I see it as digesting material into a format that is useful for busy local professionals who don't have the time to read everything themselves.

The blogs that I use include Karen Blakeman's http://www.rba.co.uk/wordpress/ and Phil Bradley's http://www.philbradley.typepad.com/, both on Internet searching. I would not claim that Sintoblog is in the same league but does it meet a need? I would love to know. Go on - click that comment button.

Purpose of Sintoblog

Dear diary
A bit misty this morning so I made myself a bowl of porridge for breakfast.......

Well that's the problem with blogs. They are on-line diaries which are of interest to the writer but possibly of limited interest to everyone else. The Social Computing course has inspired me to set up Sintoblog - but what exactly would its value be to SINTO members?
I assume that people are not interested in what I had for breakfast and even an account of what I do at work is of very limited interest (except to my boss). You are all busy people with limited time to read my postings so what would be of interest and relevance to you?
I can think of two things. First it could be a source of information about SINTO events and activities - but we already have ways of keeping people informed of these (e.g. e-mails and the web site). On the whole I think that people want focused information about things of interest to them and not a general diary. On the other hand it might alert people to things they did not know about - the famous "unknown unknowns".

The second area is a forum for alerting people about general professional issues and developments and discussing their implications. This would be a CPD service and might be of interest to Chartership candidates and new professionals. In my role as SINTO director I possibly have a bit more time than most front-line librarians to read professional journals and news sources and to comment on them. Would that be of interest to SINTO members I wonder? The only way to find out is to try it.

Then there is my Wiki. That differs from the blog in that it can be organised by subject rather than a chronological diary. I don't just want to duplicate the web site so the issue is how to use the Web 2.0 aspects of a Wiki to give added value. My initial idea is that I will use it for the SINTO Groups and for follow-up to training events to provide a forum for discussion and exchange of information when people can not meet face-to-face.

The key is will people be bothered to read these new services on a regular basis and will they respond? Is there a SINTO community out there that is interested in sharing information?

Let me know what you think or I'll go back to describing my breakfasts.

Carl