Speakers: Aysegul Kapucu, Athena Hoeppner, and Doug Dunlop (University of Central Florida)
del.icio.us is a free social bookmarking tool that can be organized with tags and bundles. UCF wanted to see if they could increase access points for library resources with on-the-fly lists for classes and individuals.
They loaded all of their databases with EZProxy string pre-pended to the URL. Then they tagged them.
The del.icio.us browser buttons were installed on the reference desk. During the reference interview, they tagged resources, and at the end, they would give the user a link to all the resources that were tagged for them. For classes, they tag the bookmarks with the course short code and include the resources listed by the professor in their syllabus. Two topical accounts are being developed through a collaboration with faculty and graduate students in Art and Engineering.
They surveyed 300+ faculty and students and received 50 responses, most of which came from seniors and reflected the courses that were included in the tagging project. 70% of the respondents had not used del.icio.us prior to the library’s involvement, which is probably due to the relatively small number of users as compared to other social networking tools like Facebook.
I could see del.icio.us being used as a replacement for hand coded subject guides or commercial products that do the same. Since it’s easy to add or edit on the fly, the guides could be more relevant than static lists.
Speakers: Michael Sauers and Christa Burns
Twitter is microblogging, like status updates on MySpace and Facebook. It’s like instant messaging, but it is asynchronous. Twitter is experiential — you have to do it with people you know to get it.
All of the twitterers in the room were wetting themselves with the excitement of getting to twitter about a Twitter presentation.
Libraries can use Twitter to broadcast information about what is going on at the library. At the Nebraska Library Center, the reference librarians send out tweets of the questions they get (not the answers). A few cities have traffic and weather reports sent out via Twitter. “We can’t get enough information about weather. Especially catalogers who don’t have windows.”
Twitter is ephemeral.
7 Tips To a Good Twitter Experience from Meryl is a good resource for new twitterers.
They must put the “Twitter is like…” slide presentation somewhere everyone can see it.
