Sunday 15 December 2013

Library 2.0

ACTIVITY
View this YouTube video called 'Building Academic Library 2.0'. This is part of a symposium sponsored by Librarians Association of the University of California, Berkeley Division in 2007. While this presentation is over one (1) hour in duration, there are a number of key points raised by a number of speakers, including the keynote speaker Meredith Farkas, that relate to any library or information agency that is trying to transform their library into a 2.0 Library.
Consider advice provided by one or more of the speakers in terms of a library and information agency that you know (as an employee or user). Select five (5) key pieces of advice from these speakers, and consider how these may be applied to your library to help it embrace a Library 2.0 ethos. Write up your findings as a post (of no more than 350 words in your OLJ).

Although the library I am working in can be considered to have embraced Library 2.0 in all of its aspects, that doesn't mean that there isn't a possibility for improvement.  After listening to the talk, the following 5 points struck a chord with me.

1.  Use of microblogging to communicate within areas of the library - since our campus has two libraries and the college has a sister college who we co-operate closely with, also with two libraries setting up some kind of professional micro-blogging knowledge exchange would have potential benefit.  
2.  The fact that current students often turn to their parents as their first port of call.  I think we could be much more proactive in involving parents in understanding how the library can help the academic success of their children.  A few sessions aimed at parents explaining how libguides work, how the catalogue works and how to search academic articles through our journal databases and a bit on citation and social/academic bookmarking would be very helpful and possibly lead to a higher take-up.
3.  "Go where the user is" - we have started greater co-operation with subject teachers through creating LibGuides with help of their input. It would be useful to also have subject specific Diigo accounts where students, teachers and the library can all tag useful links to articles and information.
4. How do we classify? We have already separated out parts of the collection, such as playscripts, biographies, graphic books, poetry.  We are also creating special areas for the IB subjects where we keep multiple copies of "hot reads" where books are no longer purely in the Dewey System. I can only think this process will continue, perhaps to the fiction area where genres are separated out.
5. Time taken to implement.  A number of times the talk mentioned that take-up time for any technology could be in the region of 18 months.  I think we have a bit of a mentality that "build it and they will come" and perhaps we need to spend even more time on user education and encouragement to use the wonderful tools we have created.

Here is a link to a summary of the talk.


References:
Farkas, M. (2007). Building Academic Library 2.0 [YouTube]. Retrieved January 30, 2014, from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_uOKFhoznI
University of California Berkeley Library. (2007). Academic Libraries 2.0 Keynote - Meredith Farkas [Blog]. Retrieved January 30, 2014, from http://blogs.lib.berkeley.edu/newdirections.php/academic_libraries_2_0_keynote_meredith_


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