The New Year
is a time of new beginnings, and it’s also a great time to make your
library more social. There are many online services available to
support libraries in offering more interactive services to the community. Most
of them are free and surprisingly easy to implement.
1. Start Talking to Your Community
Gone are the days when a simple static Web page was the main way
to communicate with your community. Fortunately there is an easy
solution to enable the library to publish up-to-the-minute information
very easily. Enter the blog. If your library is not
already publishing current information using a blog, make 2007
the Year of the Blog for your library.
Creating a blog could not be easier. Here’s
how. Two
excellent services are Blogger (free - http://www.blogger.com) and
TypePad ($5/month - http://www.typepad.com). Register for an account,
select the name of your blog, decide how you want your blog to look
from a selection of pre-set templates, and start writing. You
can have an online blog up and running in about 30 minutes. These
services are hosted so there is no software to install.
2. Enable Users to Contact Staff via Instant Messenger
In the past, libraries might have had an aversion to online chat. However,
instant messaging has not only become a legitimate mode of online
communication, but many people, especially younger users, prefer
online chat to email because it is immediate and interactive.
How does this fit into a library’s services? One of the
most traditional of all library services is reference. Reference
is basically the ability for library users to get answers and advice
from library staff. If your library offers face-to-face and
telephone-based reference service, why not give the user another
option that is more convenient for them?
Here’s how to open a new avenue of
communication for your users via Instant Messaging. To
start, create a free AOL
Instant Messenger (IM) account (http://www.aim.com) for
library staff that have contact with the public and publicize
your IM screen name(s) to the public. Expand by creating additional
free accounts on the other main Instant Messaging systems, MSN Messenger
(http://messenger.msn.com) and Yahoo Messenger (http://messenger.yahoo.com). You
can download and install the client programs for each IM system
if you wish; however, you can manage all of your accounts at
once by using products like Meebo (http://www.meebo.com). Use
Meebo to log in simultaneously to multiple IM services from a
single Web interface.
3. Share Your Photos
Does your library have a treasure trove of historical photos of
the community? Or perhaps photos of library programs?
Here’s how to start sharing library
photos with the community. Create
a free account on Flickr, the Web’s most popular
photo sharing site (http://www.flickr.com). Upload
some photos and invite the community to comment on them. Do
you have old photos that contain unidentified people? Let the
community help identify them by adding their own comments to your
photos. You can create a shared history of the community where
everyone has an opportunity to contribute. A project like this
fulfills one of the core roles of the library in helping preserve
and documents the community’s history.
4. Become Multilingual
Our communities are becoming more and more diverse. Increasingly
libraries are serving more patrons with limited English proficiency,
yet very few libraries have bilingual staff available to interpret
for non-English speaking users. To bridge this language gap,
LTLS has created PolyTalk: A Library Interpreters Network with
LSTA grant funding from the Illinois State Library to assist Illinois
libraries in communicating with limited-English speaking users.
Here’s how to enable library staff
to offer library services to limited English speaking users. Register
each library staff person who has contact with the public for
a free PolyTalk staff
account (http://www.polytalk.info). Once
registered, staff members can search the PolyTalk database of volunteer
interpreters when the need arises. When an interpreter is
located, call them by telephone to assist in communicating with
the patron. PolyTalk has volunteer interpreters in over 25
languages. If your library has bilingual staff, or if you
know of bilingual speakers in your community, ask them to volunteer
as a PolyTalk Interpreter.
5. Let Users Create Content
Librarians know that for every question, there is someone who knows
the answer. You can we use the collective knowledge of the community
to create a rich information environment. One way is to create
an online, shared work space called a Wiki. Wikis are collaborative
writing platforms that can be set up to permit readers to add
and change content, blurring the traditional line between author
and reader.
Here’s how to get started. Create
a free PBWiki account
(http://www.pbwiki.com) and provide
a basic outline structure for the content. For example, to create
a wiki about the history of local organizations, set up a main summary
page and a blank pages for each organization and let readers write
the content. Publicize the wiki’s Web address on your blog. Every
page in the wiki Web site will have an “Edit this page” button
that allows the reader to add and modify content on that page.
6. Become Transparent
Libraries that have Web sites that are maintained by library staff
are required to post their Board meeting minutes on the Web site. The
need for open and accessible government is a cornerstone of our
democracy. Library boards are public bodies and their business
is a matter of public record. Whether they have a library
Web site or not, libraries can use available Web publishing tools
to make library board meeting agendas and meeting minutes more
widely available to the public.
How to get started publishing library board meeting minutes online. The
most direct way to meet this requirement is to post the board meeting
minutes to the library’s Web site. However, if the library
does not have a Web site, it is still possible to publish this information
using the library’s blog. Many blog services, including
TypePad and Blogger, offer the ability to upload files to the library’s
blog account. Once the files are uploaded, they can be referenced
in a blog posting so that readers can download it.
7. Publish an Online Calendar of Events
Libraries are busy places and there are always a lot of activities
taking place. Give your patrons an easy way to keep up with all
your activities, programs, events and meetings with an online calendar.
Here’s how to provide an online calendar
of library events. Register
for a free Google Calendar account (http://www.google.com/calendar). An
easy way to do this is to first register for a free Google GMail account
and use the “My Account” dashboard to add the Google Calendar
service to your account. Many other calendar services are available. For
a more feature-rich alternative, subscribe to Trumba Calendar (http://www.trumba.com). You
can embed the calendar into the side column of your blog or onto your
Web page, or link users directly to the calendar’s public Web
page. Users can subscribe to events, receive notification of
changes in the events, or send reminders to themselves or others about
upcoming events. For an example of Trumba Calendar, visit the
LTLS Web site at http://www.lincolntrail.info. The
calendar is at the bottom right of the home page.
8. Create an Online Identity
If you want people to know about you, figure out where they congregate
and get your message in front of them. There is no doubt that
when it comes to cyberspace, MySpace is where millions of people are
congregating. Why not put an online profile of the library
on MySpace? It will reach a segment of your population that
may not be reached via more traditional PR methods.
Here’s how. Create a free MySpace account
(http://www.myspace.com) for the library. Use it to provide
a description of the library and its services, and links to the various
online resources you have created such as your blog(s), your library
Flickr account, the library’s wiki projects, RSS feeds, etc. As
an example, visit the Lincoln Trail MySpace page at http://www.myspace.com/lincolntraillibraries.
9. Let Users Subscribe to Your Content
It is not enough to provide interesting content and update it frequently—it
needs to be easy for users to get the content delivered to them in
a convenient way. To respond to this problem, RSS feeds have become
a primary way for information consumers to subscribe to content of
interest and to “aggregate” their subscriptions in one
place. The aggregator automatically “visits” all the Web
sites and blogs they subscribe to and flags the ones that have
new content, making it easy to zero in on the sites that have new
information.
Here’s how to provide RSS feeds of
your content. Fortunately,
virtually all blog software and many of the other social networking
software discussed in this article have the ability to automatically
generate an RSS feed to which readers can subscribe if they wish to
stay abreast of your content. All you have to do is make sure
the RSS feed is turned on, and that you provide a link to the RSS
Feed URL somewhere on your blog or in you MySpace profile to inform
readers that they can subscribe to your content.
Here’s how to subscribe to the RSS
feeds created by others using an aggregator. Register
for a free Bloglines account
(http://www.bloglines.com). Bloglines
is a Web-based news aggregator that allows you to access your
subscriptions. Once you have subscribed to a feed, it does all the
work, scanning all your subscriptions and updating the RSS feeds
when there is new information posted.
10. Share Your Knowledge
Everyone is overwhelmed by an avalanche of information. We have
all had the experience of doing a Google search and getting thousands
of hits in return. Librarians are skilled in evaluating and
recommending resources based on quality, accuracy and authenticity. We
can offer a valuable service to users by providing lists of reliable
recommended Web sites.
Here’s how to share a list of useful
Web reference sites the library staff collects in the course of
providing reference service. Create a free account on del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us). Use
your library’s del.icio.us account to share your bookmarks
with library users. Del.icio.us is a social bookmark sharing
service, so it is easy to find other users and see their bookmarks. Del.icio.us
lets you “tag” your bookmarks, so you can categorize
them any way you like.
To learn more about many of these services,
LTLS is offering a Technology Series as part of this year’s continuing education calendar. Be
sure to check these out! All of the following events are hosted
in an online environment.
February
9—Wikis
March
9—Flickr
April
13—Instant Messaging
May
11—Spotlight on Illinois Projects
June
8—Surveys, Polls, and Search Boxes
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