LIS 9763

One thing I caught on with many of the readings, particularly Karin Coombs and Michael Sauers is that part of the marketing we need to do isn’t just towards our user base: we need to market any web 2.0 technology we wish to implement to our staff, and in a way I can’t help but think this may be harder to do than market to our users.

This week’s readings and case studies shed some valuable light on how libraries should be engaging their users through the use of familiar technologies. This topic came up in previous weeks when we touched upon things like Facebook, but there were many underlying issues with these types of technologies that prevented libraries from incorporating them into their organization. Thankfully, this is not so much the case with media sharing tools like Flickr and

So I was talking with my supervisor at work the other day and she asked me what this week’s topic was in my distance course. When I told her it was media sharing, she immediately wanted to know the following: Is this a good thing for libraries? This question caused a long pause in the conversation because, unlike with other social software tools, I didn’t have a definite answer at hand. Frankly, I’m not entirely convinced.

Media sharing is becoming an important part of libraries. As internet connections became faster, information was increasingly found in digital format, and people have gradually became used to experiencing knowledge and entertainment through the computer.

If you have not checked it out, I highly recommend joining www.imeem.com. There is tons of great music and other digital media types on there to share and enjoy! 
 
That's all I really have in me for this week. ;)
 
Long live vacations!  :S
 

One of the things I remember from the Instructional methods course I took a few semesters ago was a presentation we had from a librarian working at Conestoga College.  She walked us through some of the process involved in creating a video tutorial to support a task--say using a particular function in a database.  One of the key things I took away from the presentation was to keep it short.  30-60 seconds.

       Our assignment this week was to create a prototype that could demonstrate the usefulness of social media.

Media sharing is another new technology that offers us ways of sharing, self-expression as well as the ability to promote various media. 

Perhaps I'm coming at this slightly biased, especially considering I've been deep in the thick of media sharing, but I think these types of tools have the potential to revolutionize librarian. I'm going to withhold mentioning my concerns about content quality as we address that in our project this week; but I do want to talk about how the tools themselves can be used.