Wednesday, May 12, 2010

Rebecca McDuff - Social Media in Libraries

When it all comes down to it librarianship is about connecting an audience with content.
That was the central message of the presentation. If librarians are connectors then they have to be in the same space as the audience. Social media and library 2.0 might have created new spaces where the audience hangs out; but that just means the librarian needs to get into that space. Once we are in the space we need to give our audience a chance to interact with the content and with us.

The presentation covered the ways in which U.S. libraries are getting into these spaces and rounded off with a discussion of how to implement Library 2.0. McDuff sees staff training as the key and recommended 23 Things to all staff in the Library. If you're having trouble convincing the systems team or senior management about what you're doing then get them doing 23 Things too. We need to show our colleagues in the rest of the organisation what we are doing with library 2.0.

Librarians need to become comfortable with a range of different literacies, including visual literacy. One example given was the ability to interpret tag clouds.

Chicago Public Library's You Media has done some work on transliteracy, including the use of mentors - what could we take from this?

Rebecca McDuff is a regional Public Affairs Information Resource Officer (IRO) in the U.S. Department of State.

No comments:

Post a Comment