Social Software in the Library
Posted by jfobert on January 29, 2008
The last few days I have been looking at other library sites and reading articles on how to best use social software in libraries. I have to admit that it was overwhelming goinf through the different ideas and how I could make it happen here at RWU. At this university we have a tool called MyRWU which allows the students to add feeds, get announcements, link to sites and access email. Unfortunately there is not a library presence on this site. However, our access librarian has created a feed which the students could add to their personalized Myrwu site which provides links to Books, videos, articles and new resources. This is useful but I think we need to have current information and announcements available. As an experiment, I started a blog for my department and found I could add it as a feed to my own MyRWU site. The blog address is http://rwuserials.wordpress.com/. On this blog I list new acquisitions, journal articles of interest and announcements of new databases. My intention is to promote our existing collections and increase use of them.
The challenge would be to get students to add this to their site. I think that could be accomplished if the library as a whole got together to identify different applications we could offer the community and how can we make the process of adding our link simple. Another concern is who do we get the platform to carry this project out. Although we have a good working relationship with our IT department, the MyRWU site is administered by the Marketing/PR department. There are also committees that need to be consulted before things like this can be published. I agree that control is important to have on what gets posted but also can see how the different layers slow things down.
For reasons such as I outlined above, it is essential for the library to take a leading position in the introduction of projects such as this. With careful consideration of the goals and and effective presentation of the concept the library can succeed in its mission.
