Librarians explore Social Media and Networking Tools

Categories: Social Media, Social NetworkingPosted on September 15th, 2007

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.”

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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.

[...] timely post on what a librarian from Toronto is teaching jogged my memory! She was instructing at the University of Toronto, The Social Networking Tools: [...]

Posted by » Learn about Social Media with Librarians Connie Bensen: My Conversations on September 15th, 2007 at 7:12 am

Awesome post Jeremiah, it motivated me to add some more resources in my own blog post! I don’t have to take up acres here on yours

Great stuff! keep it coming!

Posted by Connie Bensen on September 15th, 2007 at 7:17 am

hi jeremiah, i actually know a friend in stockholm who works for the national library and he has plans to bring into second life. pretty awesome stuff.

Posted by sriram on September 16th, 2007 at 4:18 am

sriram

Drop a link or slurl when you get one!

Posted by jeremiah_owyang on September 16th, 2007 at 5:46 am

[...] Jeremiah Owyang has connected with another law librarian, Connie Crosby, who posted a comment on the web strategy Facebook wall. He has also connected with Stephen Matthews, Michael Porter, and me. [...]

Posted by Jason the Content Librarian » Blog Archive » Librarians discover web strategist and vice versa on September 17th, 2007 at 1:43 pm

I sorta wonder if librarians couldn’t be teaching US about social media and networking? Isn’t a library the original (at least for the last 200 years) social media tool?…

Posted by ian lurie on September 17th, 2007 at 2:00 pm

One of the often overlooked things about Librarians and the Internet is the length of time we’ve been using it. Our online experience often pre-dates the graphical web, and we were networking (often with each other) via the text based tools — email, hytelnet & gopher — back in the day.

I also think leveraging corporate content for marketing purposes comes very easy to many of us, and with quality content being such a commodity, we’re wielding a lot of linking power.

Posted by Steve Matthews on September 17th, 2007 at 3:04 pm

Thanks so much for the write-up, Jeremiah!

Ian, definitely there are a number of librarians out there learning about these tools well before the average citizen so we are ready for it when they arrive to ask us about them. Thus, you have a whole “Info Island” of librarians working in Second Life to see how virtual worlds will apply to libraries. And librarians are in many other spaces.

We can definitely all learn from one another!

Cheers,
Connie