Friday, December 29, 2006

TCLC Technology Workshop

TCLC Technology Workshop:
Social Software and Libraries.
Held on December 12, 2006
I just wanted to share a few highlights from the TCLC Technology Workshop: Social Software and Libraries, held on December 12, 2006 at West Chester University.

For those who couldn’t make it, or who are not familiar with social software, let me explain. Social Software (SS) supports group collaboration or interaction by use of the Internet.

Some examples of SS include instant messaging, RSS, blogs, wikis, folksonomies(tagging), photo sharing, social bookmarking, podcasting, mashups and more.

The workshop focused on SS technologies and their applications in libraries.
See below PowerPoint slides.

http://www.tcnj.edu/~corrado/scholarly/palinet2006corrado-robertson.pdf

What impressed me the most was Social Libraries and in-browser Instant Messaging.

An example of social libraries is LibraryThing.

LibraryThing is an online service for storing and sharing personal library catalogs. Since it’s web-based you can access your catalog from computer. Users can catalog personal collections, keep reading lists , write reviews and make blog widgets.

LibraryThing is an easy way for libraries to display list of “New Books” on their Web site.

Meebo is an example of in-browser instant messaging program.
Launched in September 2005, Meebo is a website instant messaging program, which supports multiple IM services, including Yahoo! Messenger, Windows Live Messenger, AIM, ICQ, and Google Talk. Meebo requires no downloads or installs and, its free. Since you can access all your buddies on any computer its prefect for library services such as “Ask-the-Librarian”.

Posted by MsFinney at 4:21 PM | | Comments

Friday, December 01, 2006

SEPLA Conference

The Southeastern Pennsylvania Library Association’s annual conference was held on December 1 at the Upper Merion Township Building in King of Prussia. The conference’s theme this year, The Library As Place, received great interest and because of the overwhelming response, no more registrations were permitted two weeks before the conference.

Librarians and friends of the library attended from as far as Altoona and from Bloomsburg. The keynote speaker, Josie Parker, Director of the Ann Arbor Library System in Michigan, spoke of the library as a place and destination for patrons. She described her hometown library in Mississippi and the nice red, silk covered sofa that made her feel at home in the library. She went on to describe the efforts in her libraries to make all patrons feel welcome, from parents coming in with young children to telecommuters coming in to use the library’s wireless network for their laptop. Their libraries have offered special services such as lounge areas away from the main library with vending machines where teens often come to study or work together on schoolwork. The main branch in downtown Ann Arbor hosted a controversial program where teens had a graffiti art contest and many of the teenage boys (whom Parker pointed out as an audience difficult to reach) were able to make sales on their art. By implementing these programs and making the libraries a destination, the Ann Arbor Libraries have been very successful in getting patrons into their libraries.

Posted by Anonymous at 8:17 PM | | Comments