Librarians explore Social Media and Networking Tools

Connie Crosby left a comment on the Wall of the Web Strategy Group, a Facebook Group for the modern web decision maker, where discussions are happening in the forum. She was using this group to demonstrate to her students a healthy discussion forum within Facebook.

I messaged her, asking her about the class she was teaching. She was instructing at the University of Toronto, The Social Networking Tools: Hands on Learning, a class designed for librarians and library administrators who want and need to learn how social media, social computing is impacting their world.

What’s one of the most obvious intersections of traditional library science and social organization of information? Classification of books. We grew up with the large card catalogs filled with books ordered, sorted, by Dewey systems, they later moved to some clunky computers with black screens and green fonts. Fast forward to today, if I want to find out about a book, (or a type of book) I’ll check Amazon, which will help me find ratings, reviews, and recommend similar books.

This movement is already underway, there are over 2000 members in this Ning group discussing the next-phase of information sciences. The promise? Reduce costs, make information retrieval and sharing more efficient, and collective knowledge sharing, both patrons and administration. On a related thread, learn more about Information Architecture (the evoluiton of library sciences to the world wide web) at Boxes and Arrows, a very fine webzine.

Connie has done something right, she explains to me that “It is a one-day course. This was my third time teaching it, and the school wants me to teach it again about 10 times in the next year.”

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 15th, 2007 at 4:30 am and is filed under Social Media, Social Networking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.