Libraries need social media policies

 The question for this week is ‘Do you think libraries need policies regarding the use of social software tools? Why or why not?’ Yes, libraries absolutely need policies regarding the use of social software tools, for the same reasons they need policies for behavior in physical libraries.  Not everyone who might wish to participate will have the same understanding and expectations of appropriate online behavior, and it’s important to be clear about expectations in advance.  Both library staff and the general public may need reminding of what is and isn’t ok to do on a library blog, wiki, or online community.  Jami Haskell writes about how to create a social software policy for your library, and she notes that a library needs to be sure that social software is used “responsibly, fairly and without legal liability”, and in a manner that is consistent with the library's policy for behavior in the library building. 

The library’s social media policy should be posted on the library’s home website and on the library’s account on any social media sites the library uses.  Participating in the library’s social media sites and accounts implies agreement to abide by the library’s policy, and that should be made clear in the policy itself.  Having the policy publicly available means that there’s something to refer to when people cross the line or disagree about what’s appropriate.

If Delicious dies, try Diigo

Here's my screencast showing a few features of the bookmarking service Diigo, for those classmates who might like to consider an alternative to Delicious.

For a larger view you can try direct links http://www.screencast-o-matic.com/watch/cXfqDyDaa
or http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIo45e7142A

Now that I've posted it, I re-read the assignment instructions, and see that I ran on too long.  My apologies--the next one will be shorter!

Thanks for watching.

At the edges of the community: Lurkers and anonymous users

I think there’s a good argument to be made for welcoming lurkers to an online community.  Some people prefer not to start dancing as soon as they enter a party.  They’d like to watch for a while, and see how things go before joining in.  They might like to see which group they’d like to join, or whether they want to participate at all.  Requiring everyone to register and expecting everyone to participate at a particular level seems counterproductive to me.  Welcoming lurkers means welcoming people at whatever level of participation they choose.  Feeling welcome means that lurkers may be more likely to step up their level of participation when they’re ready. 

Martin Reed’s suggestions for welcoming lurkers and encouraging them to contribute to the community are helpful.  I especially liked his suggestion of having a new member forum that’s monitored more frequently by community moderators, so new people can talk to one another and know they’ll get a response from a moderator if needed.  He also suggests sending a community newsletter to highlight especially good content and jog the memories of those people who meant to contribute but just haven’t gotten around to it.  Several people commenting on Reed’s post mentioned that they lurk on technical communities because they don’t want to ask “dumb questions”—so they read other people’s questions and get the answers they need that way.  Learning enough to feel that you’re up to speed may take longer than just getting comfortable with a site and the community.

I think most communities are the better for requiring users to register when they want to contribute to the community.  Claiming an identity in the community means users belong, at least in a little way.  It also means that their contributions can be tracked and noted by others.  John Grohol makes several good points about user identities, including that the process of registering is in itself a barrier that may dissuade some casual mischief-makers (without being so difficult that it deters legitimate users), and that building in a reputation or rating system to the community will give members incentive to contribute.

Working together with social media tools...or not

Barriers to internal collaboration may include a lack of institutional support, employees’ fear of losing a competitive advantage by sharing information, and employees’ lack of technical savvy (or confidence in their knowledge).  Will Kelly (2009) cites all of these barriers—he also notes that use of collaborative tools is most effective in organizations with flexible work schedules—not a common feature of libraries with set open hours!  Prior experience with poorly handled group projects may put off some people, who may fear that they will end up doing more work and others will do less, or that they will spend more time trying to organize the group than in actually doing the work.  Finally, many people may be reluctant to add a new task or tool to their existing work load, especially if they do not have a clear vision of how the new tool might allow them to do a better job or improve their daily lives.  In order for collaboration to be successful, it must seem worth the effort to the people involved.  

One of the exciting things about social media projects is that many of them seem worth the effort to volunteer contributors, each of whom adds as much or as little to the project as s/he desires.  When this model is successful, it can be amazing and energizing—but many proposed projects fail for lack of sufficient interest or effort.  In an organization of employees, we can’t depend on new collaborative tools being adopted “spontaneously”.  Hutch Carpenter (2009) suggests that collaborative tools are most readily adopted when there is a specific and necessary purpose, or “defined use case” for the tool.  He also suggests that managers offer employees both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation for participating in collaborative projects.  His suggestions include using storytelling to convey a vision of the results of the proposed project, offering incentives such as recognition and rewards, using “executive reminders”, and deleting the old method that the new tool is intended to replace. 

His suggestions seem like helpful ways to make the collaborative project seem worth the effort to employees.  First, be sure that the project is for something that truly needs to be done.  Second, offer a clear vision of what the project is intended to accomplish, and how that will benefit the organization and the individuals who work there.  Third, entice and push people to participate.  If necessary, remove alternatives.  Finally, I would suggest that managers ask for employee feedback—is the collaborative project as useful as intended?  Could it be modified to work better?  What would make it more useful, convenient, or productive?  Demonstrating effective use of one collaborative tool for one particular project and asking for employee input on how to do it better will go a long way toward reducing barriers to further collaboration.

Carpenter, H. (2009). "Enterprise 2.0: Culture is as Culture Does." I'm Not Actually a Geek.

Kelly, W. (2009). "Corporate Culture, Not Technology, Drives Online Collaboration." Web Worker Daily.

Nibbling at delicious information

I enjoyed exploring the searching and sorting options in Delicious.  It was fun to look at the history of links bookmarked, and to check out the bookmarks of other people who bookmarked one of the same sites I did.  I found a person whose name I recognized, and enjoyed looking over his bookmarks.  I had some sense of his interests from communications on an email list, and it was interesting to see what else was revealed by his choices on Delicious. 

As with other social networking tools, one of the trickiest parts of using a social bookmarking site is filtering the available information.  I can see using this method of browsing linkages to find other interesting bookmarks under at least two circumstances:

·         When I’m in the mood to poke around and enjoy browsing.  If I’m in a hurry to find particular information, sorting through the bookmarks of others would likely be very frustrating. 

·         When I want to find other people who seem to have similar interests.  Again I’d need to be in an exploratory mood.  If I found someone with a high proportion of bookmarks that interested me, I could either add that person (or organization) to my network or subscribe to their RSS feeds, so I could check out their bookmarks in the future.  Right now, the most useful people in my network are my fellow students, since their current interests align so closely with mine!

For either of these uses, I’ll need to spend quite a bit more time on the social aspects of bookmarking, rather than just saving my own discoveries for later use.  I might also give a little more thought to how I tag and describe the bookmarks I save, so that they’re more useful for other people.  I have been thinking of my own needs when tagging—so, for instance, I often don’t use the tag ‘library’ or ‘libraries’, since so many of my interests relate to libraries.  Because of their high frequency, those are not especially useful tags for my own collection (at least right now).  Yet I depend on other people using those tags, so I can narrow down my searches on Delicious.  Oops.  In the spirit of contributing to the community, I guess I’ll go back and beef up my tagging…

Note for classmates and instructor:  Since the instructions for exercise 5 listed a couple of different options for tagging our bookmarks for the exercise, I settled on using 'exercise5' in addition to the '246bell' I've been using for all class-related bookmarks in Delicious.