Is your library doing something exciting with social software? Do you know of a library or a librarian who is doing cool stuff with social software? The applications could either be for their patrons or for the profession.
I’m looking for the best examples out there to highlight in my book. I’d love to see how libraries are using social software to communicate, collaborate, educate and create community online with their patrons. I’m also going to be interviewing a few “exemplars” for part of the book, so I’d love to get an idea of what you all think are the best applications of social software in libraries.
By social software, I mean blogs, wikis, Web services, rss, photo sharing, social networking/online communities, social bookmarking/tagging, podcasting, screencasting, virtual reference of any kind (SMS, IM, etc.), mobile apps, and gaming.
You can respond to this post or contact me on my contact form.
Hey Meredith,
I’m in the process of putting together what I think will be a very cool feature for our library here at UTC. The goal is to use WordPress, with the Structured Blogging plugin to produce a “new resources” feed. We plan on using categories to allow each department to pull their specific resources out of the main blog, and I’m trying desperately to integrate it with our Onenet student portal so that anyone on campus can have a “new library materials” feed on their general portal page.
If you’re interested in the details, feel free to email me.
Hello Meredith,
here is one you might find interesting: http://www.fontysmediatheek.nl. You may need Babelfish-translation for this (it is in Dutch), but our library is doing a lot of what you mention in your post. We started back in february with a library weblog, where over 40 librarians work together, but each in their own knowledge-domain. Sofar over 600 postings are online, and sofar there has not been a day where nothing new appeared (outside holiday’s). Ofcourse we use RSS all over the weblog, every category has one. Tags, in Dutch we call them ‘trefwoorden’ are also integrated, together they build a really nice Tag Cloud. All this would not be possible without our professional weblog-application ExpressionEngine.
For our brand new Fontys Library wiki we have MediaWiki, and we use it for the somewhat less dynamic library-information (openinghours, regulations etc.) but also to describe our online resources (databases, catalogs etc.) and we also use it as a collaboration tool. Oh, and most of the pictures on the weblog and wiki come from our Flickr Pro account.
All of this now starts to pay off. Our library staff gets more and more requests to give presentations, workshops and write articles about social software, not just from within the Fontys University of Professional Education, but also for other (educational) organisations in the Netherlands.
If you need more details, i’ll be happy to fill you in.