Thing the Thirteenth

I first came across TinyURL on Facebook—suddenly, it seemed like everyone I knew was posting these very short links. I didn’t quite know what to make of it; while I was often able to determine the nature of the target of a long link (this was before FB had quite integrated thumbnails, text from the target page, etc.), these new, shorter links took up so little space, and were much more aesthetically pleasing. Once I jumped on Twitter, I discovered the true purpose of link shortening: supply and demand. With only 140 characters to use, each became far more valuable (the link to this post would burn up 59 of those characters—that’s 42%!).

After TinyURL came several others in the same vein, including bit.ly (which saves you 5 characters over TinyURL, or about 3.6% on Twitter) and HootSuite’s integrated versions, ow.ly and ht.ly, all of which allow you to track metrics on your shortened links if you log in.

As far as usefulness in the library, the major function of link shortening is for use with our Facebook or Twitter accounts; we can create shorter, more memorable links to post to our social media outlets, as well as to tell to patrons who may be interested.

Thing the Twelfth

It seems so very strange now, but when I was in college, Facebook didn’t exist—at least not for all but the last couple of months. A few years later, under enough pressure from people I talked to all the time in real life anyway (“but you need to be on Facebook!”), I finally signed up, just before my college email address—then required for an account—expired (does anybody even remember the days before it was free to everyone?). I didn’t even have an internet connection at home at the time—much less on my phone—and I found myself wondering what use it would ever be to me.

Five or so years later, I’ve moved out of my “it’s-a-phone-not-a-radio-or-a-camera-or-a-computer” phase and into a “seriously-BlackBerry-and-iPhone-how-hard-is-it-to-put-a-fully-functional-browser-on-a-smartphone” area. I now have Facebook (and Twitter and Google Reader…) on my phone, and feel somehow obligated to check it every spare minute I get.

I’m going to skip over the stalking-people-you-went-to-high-school-with-but-haven’t-talked-to-since aspects of Facebook, because they’re not really worth anything in this context. As a writer, I find Facebook to be useful for a couple of purposes. First off, like Twitter, it’s a great venue for anything in the flash fiction area; you can post all kinds of clever little things in your statuses, or, if you’ve got something a bit longer to say, you can use the Notes feature in much the same way you’d use a blog (plus, you can tag people in your notes). Secondly, you can create a page to promote your blog, etc. It’s very strange, but also kind of cool to realize that you have “fans.”

For libraries, Facebook is obviously not a tool for connecting with other libraries they went to high school or college with. It’s a marketing tool. In some ways, it’s better than your actual website—people are more likely to casually check FB several times a day than to swing by your website looking for updates. Essentially, it’s kind of like putting a billboard along the highway—people can find things they weren’t even looking for (except that instead of selling products people don’t need in order to make a profit, we’re offering access to information and services for free). You don’t even have to stick strictly to things within your library—our own Facebook page has recently posted things like a reminder for voter registration for the upcoming city elections.

The interesting irony here is that, for a place like the library, which doesn’t have the same kind of pop culture presence as some swoon-inducing musician/movie star/whatever, in order to get people to like your Facebook page so that they see all the great events and services you’re promoting there, you have to somehow advertise it—on your website, in the library, etc. Once you’ve caught a few people’s attention, though, word-of-mouth (and its corrollary, “saw-on-a-friend’s-Facebook”) will start to help you out. From there, as long as you’re regularly posting interesting content and interacting with the people who visit/post on your page, Facebook can be one of the best marketing tools available—plus, it’s free!

Thing the Eleventh

For this Thing, I chose to browse LinkedIn for different types of content rather than create my own profile. I quickly discovered via a forbidding 403 Status page that viewing company profiles is restricted to registered members; instead, I opted to browse some of the kinds of jobs that were posted and check out a few professionals’ profiles, including one for a Keith Richards (not that one). It was interesting to see things like how many connections each person had, what their specialties were, and essentially get a brief résumé—I can easily see how this would be very useful for professionals to further their careers, network, etc.

However, in a library setting, I don’t see LinkedIn being a particularly helpful resource. We could refer our patrons there, but it’s likely that the patrons who are looking for job help do not have much professional job experience yet, and without already having a fair amount of professional experience, it seems like a LinkedIn profile would almost make you look worse rather than better—when the majority of profiles I saw had 250+ connections, it becomes more obvious by comparison that someone has no experience and doesn’t know anyone yet. These patrons would probably be better served by our own job resources.

Thing the Tenth

I’ve been using GoodReads for a while now. I actually chose it over LibraryThing for a grand total of one reason: LibraryThing limits free usage to 200 books; GoodReads does not impose any such limits, meaning that I can keep my reading list of 600+ books (yes, that’s just “to-read”; it’s worse when you add in what I’ve already read) there without having to pay anything.

I haven’t fully explored all the features of GoodReads yet. I have begun making use of the ability to create your own “shelves,” which can be used like subject cataloging, but also like tagging—I’ve seen shelves like “mystery” and “biography/memoir,” but also like “read in high school” and “abandoned books.” You can keep track of books you own (including date and location of purchase), and even tell people which ones you’re willing to swap (just as long as you’re really willing to give them up—you don’t get them back). You can keep track of your progress on a book, how many times you’ve read it, and the dates you started and finished it. And, of course, you can rate books and write reviews—you even have the option of hiding your review if it contains spoilers (people will see a message saying “review hidden because it contains spoilers” and allowing them to click to read it).

GoodReads also has apps available for both Android and iPhone. They’re not free (which is the major reason I haven’t played around with them yet), but at 99¢ they are cheap (which is the reason that I probably eventually will), and they allow you to do cool things like scan a book’s barcode to add it to your list.

For librarians (read: compulsive catalogers), these are two fabulous sites that allow you to keep track of all kinds of books in all kinds of ways; for libraries, the ability to connect LibraryThing to the catalog for supplemental content on materials we own (reviews, tags, etc.) is a great tool for our users.

Final analysis: these sites are awesome.

Thing the Ninth

Starting this Thing, I thought to myself Wow, I haven’t used Delicious in a long time. It’ll be interesting to see what I’ve got in there. As it turned out, it was actually sort of boring to see what I had in there. I ended up deleting a few links to things I apparently thought were important at the time, but couldn’t see myself ever reading again—a lot of them were news articles I probably expected or intended to write something about, or to share with people, but didn’t. Or did, and then never needed them again. Others were links to blogs and things that I now follow via Google Reader, so keeping the links in Delicious is kind of redundant. At the time, I’m sure it was better than keeping them in a Word document on a flash drive, but I’ve hardly ever used it, even when I had recently signed up.

I don’t see a whole lot of uses for Delicious in the library. It’s possible that we could fill it with interesting library-related links, and then publicize that list on the website, or through some of our other social media outlets, but it’s just as easy to host that list directly on our other pages, since our patrons can already reach them from any computer. If we had a significant number of patrons who happened to use Delicious, they could browse our collection for things to bookmark, but even this seems a bit unlikely.

Thing the Eighth

Tagging is an interesting beast. If you went to library school, the concept probably makes you want to have a seizure or run screaming from the room. You’re envisioning a tag cloud that includes “Twain,” “Mark Twane,” “Huckulbary fin,” and “books i dident read even tho i was suposed to,” aren’t you? Your eye is twitching.

As far as blogs go, tagging can be quite useful. For example, in WordPress, you can create categories for posts, such as “Adult Services,” “Events and Programs,” or ”Posts Nobody Will Get.” These categories are great, but also very broad. In a library setting, they might correspond to areas like “General Fiction,” “Mystery,” and “Audiobooks.” Tags are more specific; for example, you might write a post where you mention something like authority control or Metallica or fax machines. You may never write about these things again, so you don’t want to create a category just for one post—but you do want people to be able to find that post, and to be able to collect all the posts that talk about it together. This is where tags become useful; you can create a tag for that post, and then if you do ever write about the same thing, you can tag that later post, too.

Tagging isn’t exactly like subject cataloging, though. The major difference is that it doesn’t have any sort of thesaurus or authority control. Any string of characters can be used as a tag; it won’t even standardize for spelling, so it’s possible that something could end up bearing tags as heinous as the ones you envisioned in the first paragraph. Plus, it often happens that multiple similar tags are used, e.g. “tags,” “tagging,” and “tag clouds.” Each of these will appear as a separate tag, even if these three users all meant the same thing. This is why we invented authority control in the first place. Sometimes, sites allow users to suggest that similar tags be merged, but this is an after-the-fact solution, and I’m not certain whether it automatically suggests that people use the merged tag after this has been done.

However, as a supplement to subject cataloging, tags can be useful. They allow users to search for materials by content without having to know exactly how to construct a complete LC subject string, or to find similar themes or plot devices that may not specifically correspond to the SHM. The way this is done in our catalog opens up subject searching to more people by allowing for both structured and informal subject searches. It should never be considered as a replacement for controlled vocabulary, but it can be used successfully alongside it.

Thing the Seventh

Chapter One: The Old Days

I was introduced to instant messaging at the end of last millennium. I had just started college, and cell phones were not yet ubiquitous. If I wanted to call my friends and family (who were not yet trademarked by Verizon), I had to use a prepaid long-distance phone card. Uphill. Both ways. Through the snow.

Then, one day, I heard a high-pitched voice say to one of my roommates: “uh-oh!” The following conversation ensued:

Me: Quoi?
Roommate: ICQ.
Me: Quoi?
Roommate: Instant messaging. Talk to your friends online for free.
Me: Yes, please.

And so began my love-hate relationship with instant messaging. When my internet connection, the IM service’s servers, and my friends’ internet connections were all in accord, life was wonderful, and many hours were spent multitasking conversations, or occasionally, in group chat. When any one of these things was misbehaving, curses were uttered against the faceless IT crowd responsible for the horrific failure at such a critical point in whatever crucially important conversation a couple of eighteen-year-olds were having online at 2 in the morning. Eventually, we progressed from ICQ to Yahoo and MSN, often using multiple services at once to catch all of our friends who used only one, or switching between them when one went down (strangely, nobody I knew ever used AOL, which, for a time, was the only one anybody had ever heard of). Much more recently, we have seen the advent of IM within programs such as Facebook and Gmail, and even on your smartphone (one of the few things BlackBerry still does well is their PIN-based IM service).

When my wife lived in Korea for eight months, not long after we started dating, we spent countless hours using the voice chat feature in MSN Messenger; I don’t know how much money we saved this way, but I’m willing to bet it would have been in the thousands of dollars.

Chapter One summary: IM is awesome.

Chapter Two: Of Libraries and IM

I’ve heard of several libraries—mainly university libraries—that provide reference services via IM. In a lot of ways, especially on college campuses, this is a fabulous idea; I knew very few people in my undergraduate career who actually went to the library if they didn’t have to—or who just didn’t go even if they did have to. Being able to ask questions in a more anonymous fashion without having to pick up the phone or actually go to the library would certainly have gotten some of them to use the library more often (read: ever).

One major drawback to providing reference services via IM is that it is possible that it would require a staff member be dedicated to this task at all times. However, it is also possible that patrons seeking this type of reference service would be more understanding of slight delays in response time (due to helping in-house patrons), and this would likely be preferable to having to be placed on hold or transferred during telephone reference—at least for those who are tech-savvy enough to use IM.

Chapter Two summary: IM may be more awesome in academic libraries than public libraries.

Thing the Sixth

I’ve never Dugg, as it were. It’s one of the few social media things I’ve never tried out. The concept is quintessentially Web 2.0: everything is user-submitted, and the more people who Digg an item, the more visible it becomes. It brings an alternative answer to the question: “Who decides what’s news?”

There are, of course, both pros and cons to letting a generalized mass determine content in this way. The positives include the fact that there is little chance for content to be influenced by the political weight of its creators or the depth of their pockets—if noone actually finds your content interesting, noone is going to Digg it. The negatives include hampsterdance and that drugged-up dentist kid.

Today’s content consisted of an interesting mix of world news, 4/20 jokes, smartphone articles, and pop culture references (Star Wars and the Jersey Shore, to name a couple).

How is a raven like a writing desk?

Are public libraries anything like Digg? Certainly, there are some similarities. Consider:

Much of the material the library owns, as well as what databases and other services we subscribe to, is determined by public demand. Think of each checkout of a book, each use of a database, and each voteorder we receive as our own version of a Digg.

That being said, there are some ways in which public libraries are not at all like Digg. These include all that stuff you go to library school for, things like Authority Control, or The Reference Interview. These are the ways that we help people find what they are actually looking for, not just things they StumbleUpon.

Thing the Fifth

Sometimes, I think Twitter is kind of like TV—like a really weird public access channel, except that big corporations are on, too, so you get this mix of inane babble, endless advertisements, and occasional brilliance. Also, very much like TV, though you don’t have control over the content, you do have control over what you choose to see. If you really enjoy something, you keep following whoever is putting it out there, but if you don’t, you have the option of clicking the lovely “unfollow” button—Twitter’s equivalent of changing the channel. Finally, again, much like TV, there are very convincing arguments that most of what you see will shorten your attention span and make you dumber.

I’ve had Twitter for a while now. A lot of the people I follow are friends; the rest are people with varying degrees of celebrity, from local bands to internet celebrities (read: bloggers), all the way up to Craig Ferguson and Steve Martin. Not everyone—and not even everyone you’d expect—has anything worthwhile to say. If you tweet 30 times a day to promote your event/book/other-means-of-transferring-money-from-me-to-you, I’m going to unfollow you in much the same way as I’m going to change the channel the instant I discover that it’s All Commercials, All the Time.

On the other hand, though, I’ve discovered that it’s a good way to alert people to new blog posts, because I don’t keep anything resembling a regular schedule, and a lot of people I know don’t use RSS or Facebook. I try to keep this to a minimum (not wholly difficult given my infrequent posting schedule); it turns out that most people prefer random comments, stabs at humor, and interesting links to constant, bombarding advertisement—who knew?

For the library, I think Twitter can be a useful tool, as long as it keeps to these same guidelines. I don’t think, however, that it will connect people to the library in the same way as a blog, largely because of the character limit (imagine trying to teach someone how to download an eBook 140 characters at a time). However, it can be useful for brief “did-you-knows,” links to library-themed content, and occasional updates on what’s going on at the library.

Final note: Hashtags? Hate them. I don’t know anyone who actually finds them an effective method of finding information—not even the kind of information you find on Twitter. More often, I find that people use them ironically to make jokes, or as a very brief commentary on whatever they’ve just said. Or, occasionally, someone will say “hey, everyone, let’s make #somethingasinine a trending topic! It’ll be hilarious!” and everyone who follows him/her will say something asinine and use that hashtag. The problem is that, usually, nobody cares about the topic, and probably nobody actually reads what anyone else has said; it’s just a silly game. Authority control.

Thing the Fourth

Whether or not you are aware of it, if you have an online account, the odds are good that you have an account with a photo sharing service. Google automatically entails Picasa; Yahoo, Flickr. I first discovered this when I got an Android phone (made by Google, and incorporating many of their products); your options for sharing pictures you’ve taken include sending them to Picasa, which, upon investigation, I realized was linked to my Google account. Upon even further investigation, I discovered that having an account for one Google service gives one access to all of Google’s services (although a very short additional registration may be required). For example, any photos that you post to Blogger are also hosted at Picasa.

Some of these sites actually bill themselves as “photoblogs,” where users post pictures much as they would post regular blog entries. These can usually be titled and captioned, and often commented on. Another common use of sites such as these is for hosting images to be used on blogs. Images (again, just like blog posts) can usually be marked as either private or public. Since I discovered that I had a Picasa account, I have mainly used it as a drop box for pictures I’ve taken that I feel I may use in a blog someday.

Some good uses of photo sharing services in libraries include publishing pictures from events or covers of recommended books. However, there is more to maintaining a good photostream than simply uploading endless sets of images. Let’s explore:

What makes a good photostream?

1. Titles and captions

If your photo sharing service allows for these things, use them! Nobody is going to be interested in a hundred images with titles like DSC_0001. We’re in the business of cataloging, and we should know better than to ever post unexplained, uncategorized content. If the service you use automatically pulls the image title from the filename, save it and rename it with something descriptive before uploading it. Titles and captions make your content more dynamic, and will result in more visitors to your site actually looking at your content, rather than just skimming it.

2. Albums

Again, if your photo sharing service allows for it, group your photos into albums. This is especially useful for grouping all of the pictures from an event. You can label the album with the name of the event, allowing your site’s visitors to view everything from the same event all at once. Again, there’s no reason for us to post unorganized content. Even miscellaneous images can go in a catch-all album simply titled “Miscellaneous.”

3. Image Quality

The worst thing you can do for your photo sharing service is to post low-quality pictures. Unless you’re using a really old camera (or possibly a cell phone!), this probably isn’t going to be an issue, but it can still happen. Grainy, unfocused pictures—or simply images that cut off parts of people—mean that noone who sees your photostream is going to take you seriously. Even worse, they will probably never visit again.

4. Image Quantity

Generally, less is more. Have you ever had to sit through an endless session with someone who just got back from a vacation and insists that you see every single picture they took on the entire trip? Did you start thinking about gnawing your own leg off to escape? Posting a thousand pictures of an event is the virtual version of that. If you have six different pictures of something that are essentially the same, just choose the best one. You should still, of course, adhere to principle #3.

As long as libraries adhere to some basic principles such as these, photo sharing can be a fantastic tool.