In the second half of a two-article series, Phil Bradley looks at a further raft of Web 2.0 applications, which are re-defining how library and information professionals provide information to, and communicate with, their users.
Last month I explained the basic concept behind Web 2.0 and provided a few examples of how various utilities could be used to enhance the service you provide to your users. To recap briefly, Web 2.0 is the name given to a whole raft of new resources based on the web, rather than on your own computer, which can be viewed by user groups (or indeed the whole world), allowing you to share information and functionality in a way that has not been possible before.
There are many photograph-sharing utilities now available: probably the best – certainly the most well known – is Flickr.1 The idea is very simple – Flickr allows you to put your photographs up on the web to share with other people. The possibilities are almost endless; if you have run an event in your library of almost any type, why not consider creating your own photo stream to make the memories of the event available to your users? A good example is the ‘Murder by the Book’ collection2 which records a murder mystery event. Alternatively, if you have run any author readings, commemorate the event by posting the pictures at Flickr. Or you could take photographs of your library staff, your collections, or indeed create a photographic tour around your library. How about promoting and showing your training resources or book displays? A very popular collection at the moment is ‘Librarian Trading Cards’.3 Not only would these be of interest to colleagues in other libraries, they could be incorporated into a training package for new users. It’s very easy to create an account at Flickr, and it’s free if you keep to an upload limit of 20mb per month. If this is not enough there is a commercial version available for less than £15 a year that increases that limit to 2gb per month.
Instant messaging
If you run an enquiry service you might want to consider offering an instant messaging option. MSN Messenger is another free service that is very simple and easy to set up. You can give your contact details to your users and allow them to contact you immediately, rather than by email or having to come down to your information centre. The University of British Columbia has been running such a service4 for some time now: as well as using MSN Messenger the service is also available on Yahoo Messenger and AOL Instant Messenger. Alternatively, use a resource such as Meebo5 to connect instantly to all of them, to give your users more flexibility on how to contact you. If you’re concerned about the amount of time this will take, you could always limit the hours that the service is available until you have gauged the level of interest.
If you work in a public library environment I’m sure that you’re always being asked for book recommendations. This can be a time-consuming process and relies on the knowledge of various members of staff. Rather than take a ‘hit and miss’ approach, consider using one or more of the book reading utilities that are now available, such as Chain Reading.6 This particular utility allows people to input details of books that they are reading or that they want to recommend, and to write their own reviews of books. Library users can then be pointed towards these lists, enabling them to explore new titles and authors that they would not have otherwise been aware of. Individual members of staff could take responsibility for different subject areas; not only is it a quick and easy way to answer the ‘what should I read’ question, it will increase the profiles of your staff. But you could of course simply direct users to more generic book-discovery applications such as The Literature-Map.7 For music, consider using Pandora8 or, for films, explore MyFilmz.9
If your library runs a reading club, or you have been promoting the Richard & Judy book club, these are all utilities that you could incorporate into the service, and of course you could always encourage users to start using the services themselves.
Alert colleagues to new resources
There are lots of utilities for commercial or academic environments as well. Weblogs can be used to alert colleagues and users to new resources, but there are other Web 2.0 applications that can be used if you prefer not to go down that route. Furl10 is a superb resource which enables you to store indefinitely web pages you have found. As usual, accounts are free and easy to set up, and to use the service effectively Furl provides a bookmark or link in your browser. Once you find a page you want to keep, simply click on the link, decide which of your user-defined folders you want to save it to, and there you are – the page is saved. Due to copyright restrictions you cannot share the article with anyone else, but you can make your collection of links available to colleagues so that they can keep up to date with the material that you’re finding, and they can click on the link to view the resource themselves. It is also possible to include your Furl collection in your weblog so readers can stay in touch, or provide an RSS feed so they can follow you via a news aggregator such as Bloglines.11
Alternatively, explore a resource such as Net Snippets.12 This is a piece of software that you download on to your computer, allowing you to save exactly what you need from the web, add your own comments and notes, then share that information with colleagues and users.
In the previous article I referred to Rollyo,13 through which you can create your own search engine that will only search top-quality websites as defined by you. You could take this one stage further and incorporate a ‘swicki’. A swicki is a search engine that learns from its users, and the search results are affected by the things that your users are uniquely interested in, so you can create your own community search engine. Swickis are provided by the Eurekster search engine,14 which can host the service for you, so no technical knowledge is required. If you want to see one in action, either use the examples provided by Eurekster, or take a look at one provided by UKeiG (UK Electronic Information Group)15 The resource will also automatically create a ‘tag cloud’ of terms and concepts that your particular user group is interested in.
Most of the utilities that I’ve mentioned have focused on textual or photographic data, but you could get involved with audio material as well. Podcasting has been around for some time now, and some libraries are beginning to experiment with its use. Put simply, a podcast is an audio file which can be downloaded on to an iPod or other device that plays audio files. Once again, these are simplicity themselves to create – all you need is a pair of headphones, a microphone (these are often available as a one-piece unit costing less than £20), some software to record the podcast and a hosting service to store it (or you could use your own site for this).
You can create podcasts on any subject you want. The University of Sheffield Library has created a podcast tour of their library.16 Users simply need to download the podcasts on to their player, stop beside a numbered post and then listen in order to find out more about the services. This is a superb resource for large libraries, or if staff have to spend a lot of their time inducting new members of staff and explaining the available resources.
Librarians could spend perhaps 10 minutes a week recording podcasts mentioning new books or other resources, descriptions of events, introductions for and of new members of staff, recordings of reviews, or snippets of author readings. If you’re interested in the possibilities of podcasts it’s worth visiting sites such as Castpost17 or Inkysoftware18 to see exactly what is available.
Smoke and mirrors?
There has been a lot of discussion about Web 2.0, and some people have dismissed it as being smoke and mirrors or simply a different way of doing the same things. It’s certainly possible to view the entire concept as a reinvention of the wheel, but it’s not what I think. Web 2.0 utilities allow libraries to fulfil their roles in an entirely different and innovative way. The information professional is increasingly becoming less tied to a specific location in order to do their job, and the web enables us all to connect to others in new and interesting ways. Moreover, many of the resources mentioned allow librarians to interact with their users with a greater level of immediacy than ever before and it has never been easier to create real communities of interest. Information, knowledge and experiences can be shared effectively, allowing everyone to gain something from the increased interaction.
As well as Web 2.0 we now have Library 2.0 or L2 for short – descriptive of a library that embraces the Web 2.0 technology. How different is Library 2.0 from our existing libraries and information centres? It requires a fundamental change in the way in which we view the provision of information; it is much less them coming to the library, and much more the library going to them, whoever ‘they’ are.
These utilities allow us to continue the job of providing information, but much more broadly, and with feedback and contributions from the people who matter the most – the library users. However, in order to make the most of these opportunities, library and information professionals need to get to grips with technologies. The important point here is not the technology itself, since most of these applications do not require a great deal in the way of coding and so on, but being open to the use of it. This should hardly need saying, since most librarians that I’ve met are keen to move ahead and explore new resources; I think the problem lies with ‘the powers that be’ being open to, and accepting, change – potentially a much more difficult area!
Web 2.0 resources allow us to change our view of what a library or information centre should do, and they allow us to put that into practice, in order to create Library 2.0. As for what the terms actually mean, I don’t think that’s terribly important. What is important is an awareness that we are in a position to do more than we’ve been able to in the past, and to embrace that.
If you’re inspired by the idea of Web 2.0, the Wikipedia article19 provides some useful links to further discussions, and my webpage20 and weblog21 should help to keep you up to date with new resources.
References
1 www.flickr.com
2 www.flickr.com/photos/theloudlibrarian/sets/1282646/
3 www.flickr.com/groups/librariancards/
4 www.library.ubc.ca/home/im.html
5 www9.meebo.com/
6 www.chainreading.com/
7 http://literature-map.com/
8 www.pandora.com/
9 http://myfilmz.net/
10 www.furl.net/
11 www.bloglines.com
12 www.netsnippets.com/basic/index.htm
13 www.rollyo.com
14 http://swicki.eurekster.com/
15 http://ukeig--focussed--search-swicki.eurekster.com/
16 www.lbasg.group.shef.ac.uk/downloads/
17 www.castpost.com/
18 www.inkysoftware.com/spunkicast.html
19 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_2.0
20 www.philb.com/iwantto.htm
21 http://philbradley.typepad.com/i_want_to/
Phil Bradley is an internet consultant, trainer, web designer and author. He writes Update’s Internet Q&A each month, and the third edition of his book The Advanced Internet Searcher’s Handbook (Facet Publishing) is currently available.
Updated: 31 May 2006