I just finished lunch with a number of lovely librarians from SW Michigan (one of them asked me how I ended up at their table, and I said "I looked for people I didn't know" -- I didn't explain that I really don't know anyone anyway...). Now we're listening to Jenny Levine and Michael Stephens talk about web 2.0 and rural libraries. My heroes! Jenny's showing us a number of examples of blogs as encouragement to start one for our own library. I keep meaning to start a blog for my library but haven't gotten around to it because I want to "do it right." I need to override my perfectionist tendencies and just do it. Perfection doesn't matter so much in the web 2.0 world. It's cool when you can create something really extraordinary or neat, but it's not necessary.
Jenny's talking about instant messaging now, and one of the librarians at my table just said "can't they just call?" That's pretty much what my staff think about meebo, too. Meebo is something I have set up for my library, and I'm starting to get more and more questions on it. Yes, people could call, but they don't want to. We have to go to where our users are... We have a Google calendar, too, and I'm happy to say that at my last knitting program, 2 people came after seeing the event listed at our on-line calendar.
We'll start a myspace page this summer to support the summer reading program, and I'd love to get a Flickr account going for the library. You can do virtual library tours at Flickr! What a good idea... I've also set myself a goal to do some podcasting this summer, one podcast for each week of our 7-week summer reading program. A 15-minute podcast should take 1.5 hours to produce, and all I need is a microphone for my iPod. Easy, right?
Well, sort of. It's all free except that it takes time. And we don't have a lot of time. I have an advantage in that I keep a personal blog and Flickr site anyway, so I don't have to figure those things out from scratch. And I still haven't started those things for my library because of the time factor. Decisions about who contributes, what we write about, when we update, and then actually doing it... that's more than just "a little" staff time.
I'm going to have to make the time, though. As Michael just said, "throw out the culture of perfect." Just get it done - you can always go back and fix it later. Blogging and photos let you tell stories online and create a virtual experience for your users, something you can't do through other, more traditional methods of information dispersal.
Ok, Michael says these are 5 things we can do NOW to keep on top of tech:
- be a trend spotter - read wired, etc. looking for new things, new ideas
- form an emerging technology committee (maybe I could partner with another small library nearby)
- try learning a 2.0 program (check out ning.com)
- create a "what's new" blog using blogger or wordpress
- explore presence -- ways to get the library out into the 2.0 world using rss feeds, flickr, etc.
