Tag: social media

I took Facebook off my phone…

…and I’m kind of surprised and pleased by what happened.

Admittedly, it’s only been two days, and I’ve done this before (for different reasons), so I know I might eventually add it back. But for now, it’s doing what I had hoped and more.

I don’t have an endless scroll of posts and links and memes and videos to occupy my brain in the down times. I still have other social media apps, so there are plenty of things to occupy that space, but they aren’t nearly as prolific. Also, although I’m still on Twitter, I barely read it and usually only a subset of content when I do. (Come find me on Mastodon, if that’s your thing, though I’m not much more active there.)

The thing that surprised me, though, was a resurgence of the use of Pocket. I’ve started throwing links to essays and articles there for later reading as I peruse the scroll of social media elsewhere. Then, when I’m waiting in line, or have a few minutes before the next thing, or eating a meal alone, I have some handy reading material that I actually want to see.

I get “all caught up” on Instagram more quickly than I used to, and I’m trying to browse the Flickr app regularly, too, but it’s not a well designed.

When I do look at FB, it’s on a desktop browser with a plugin that filters out certain content. I mean, I know that one cousin loves right wing media and posting racist/homophobic memes, but thanks to the filter, I can remain ignorant on the details.

I find that in my time away from FB, not much had actually happened that needs my attention. I hope eventually I can settle back into the apathetic disinterest I had for it years ago.

I still have Messenger, though. Too many people I like use it instead of texting or email.

ER&L 2013: Breaking Up is Hard To Do

Ending a Relationship with an E-Resource

someecards.com - If you're tired of discussing my nightmarish relationship, I'd love the opportunity to begin discussing my nightmarish breakup

Speakers: Dani Roach & Carolyn DeLuca, University of Saint Thomas

We’re all very familiar with print serials cancellation projects, but now we’re starting to see this in the electronic world, particularly as more libraries are walking away from big deals. There are lots of documents talking about the life-cycle of an eresource, but cancellation hasn’t really been addressed until recently, with the TERMS section covering it along with others.

As much work as it is to get into a relationship with a vendor/resource, it’s just has hard to leave it.

Eresource breakups are often caused by the renewal time, low use, high cost, etc. The heart-breaker could be internal players like the liaison or ERMS staff acting as the divorce lawyer once the decision was made, or external players like the publisher/provider/broker/consortium/vendor.

The three types of breakups are cancelled, ceased, or migrated. In each case, you need to assess the status, the holdings, the platform, and the provider. There are some things we have control over, but there are many more things outside of our control, due to the marketplace around information. Don’t take it personally, libraries. It’s not about you.

There are tools where you make the change (catalog, ERM, course management system, and paper files, proxy config, local tools, customized holdings, archives/Portico/local), and then there are tools where you announce the change (LibGuides, RefWorks, site-wide search metadata, blogs & other social media).

UKSG created a cancellation form, which looks lovely. And sadly, our ERMS can’t track everything.

Vendors can play the role of best friend. They want to help, and make sure we’re making the right decision so we don’t come back crying on their shoulder later. Some tips: Know who signed the license, confirm post-cancellation rights, do not count on a refund, plan cancellations and migrations well in advance of renewal, and know what you want (if replacing a product, do your research).

Considerations from the publisher/provider: ownership transfers, licensing, grace periods, overlap periods, and personal relationships.

When does it end? In general, the library gets to decide when to shut it down. It could be immediate, or you could wait until the end of the semester or the end of the subscription term. Sometimes resources are put on probation and given some time to demonstrate value to the community.

What’s left? Post-cancellation access? Deleting or weeding — did you ask the provider to remove the old edition? When a product has migrated, you’ll need to change the tutorials, screenshots, videos, etc.

[copy of the presentation and accompanying materials]

conference tweeting etiquette

“Tiny birds in my hand..” by ~Ilse

Conference season, or at least the part of it that appeals to my area of librarianship, is starting soon.

Up first for me is Computers in Libraries in DC, where I won’t be attending, but instead vacationing nearby (since it is so close) and visiting with colleagues and friends who will be attending. I’d go, but I already have funding this year for three conferences, and it didn’t seem fair to ask for another.

Next,  I fly to Austin for the Electronic Resources & Libraries conference. From the venue to the content, this is becoming my favorite conference. I’ve had to actively introduce more diversity to the sessions I choose to attend, otherwise I would spend the whole conference geeking out about use data and spreadsheets and such.

Finally, I head to Buffalo for the conference that shaped me into the librarian I became: NASIG (North American Serials Interest Group). I like this one because I’ve known many of the attendees for the entirety of my relatively short career, and because it works very hard to not be just a librarian conference, but rather an industry-wide discussion of all things serial in libraryland.

It was in the context of thinking about these upcoming conferences that I read the latest Prof Hacker blog post from The Chronicle of Higher Education. Ryan Cordell writes about his experiences with conference tweeting and the recent revelations he has had regarding the impact this can have on the presenters, whether they are active participants on Twitter or not. Many things he wrote resonated with me, and reminded me that Twitter — as well as other popular social media platforms — is no longer the private back-channel of a few techie friends, but is a global platform that can have a broader impact than any of us may know.

I suggest reading the whole article, but I would like to quote here the Principles of Conference Tweeting that Cordell offers, as something for us all to keep in mind:

  1. I will post praise generously, sharing what I find interesting about presentations.
  2. Likewise, I will share pertinent links to people and projects, in order to bring attention to my colleagues’ work.
  3. When posting questions or critiques, I will include the panelist’s username (an @ mention) whenever possible.
  4. If the panelist does not have a username—or if I cannot find it—I will do my best to alert them when I post questions or critiques, rather than leaving them to discover those engagements independently.
  5. I will not post questions to Twitter that I would not ask in the panel Q&A.
  6. I will not use a tone on Twitter that I would not use when speaking to the scholar in person.
  7. I will avoid “crosstalk”—joking exchanges only tangentially related to the talk—unless the presenter is explicitly involved in the chatter.
  8. I will refuse to post or engage with posts that comment on the presenter’s person, rather than the presenter’s ideas.

NASIG 2012: Mobile Websites and APP’s in Academic Libraries Harmony on a Small Scale

Speaker: Kathryn Johns-Masten, State University of New York Oswego

About half of American adults have smart phones now. Readers of e-books tend to read more frequently than others. They may not be reading more academic material, but they are out there reading.

SUNY Oswego hasn’t implemented a mobile site, but the library really wanted one, so they’ve created their own using the iWebKit from MIT.

Once they began the process of creating the site, they had many conversations about who they were targeting and what they expected to be used in a mobile setting. They were very selective about which resources were included, and considered how functional each tool was in that setting. They ended up with library hours, contact, mobile databases, catalog, ILL article retrieval (ILLiad), ask a librarian, Facebook, and Twitter (in that order).

When developing a mobile site, start small and enhance as you see the need. Test functionality (pull together users of all types of devices at the same time, because one fix might break another), review your usage statistics, and talk to your users. Tell your users that it’s there!

Tools for designing your mobile site: MobiReady, Squeezer, Google Mobile Site Builder, Springshare Mobile Site Builder, Boopsie, Zinadoo, iWebKit, etc.

Other things related to library mobile access… Foursquare! The library has a cheat sheet for answers to the things freshman are required to find on campus, so maybe they could use Foursquare to help with this. Tula Rosa Public Library used a screen capture of Google Maps to help users find their new location. QR codes could link to ask a librarian, book displays linked to reviews, social media, events, scavenger hunts, etc. Could use them to link sheet music to streaming recordings.

Mobile websites and APP’s in academic libraries: Harmony on a small scale

my twitter infographic

my twitter infographicIt’s a mashup of two of my favorite things — data visualization and social media. Of course I’m going to make one.

The interesting thing is that for some reason I come across as a gamer according to the algorithms. Unless you count solitaire, sudoku, and Words with Friends, I’m not really a gamer at all. The PS2, games, and accessories I bought from my sister last November that is are sitting in a corner unassembled are also a testament to how little I game.

Anyway, click on the image to get the full-sized view, and if you make your own, be sure to share the link in the comments.

library day in the life round 6

I plan on using Twitter and Flickr to capture my week this time. CoverItLive will show the tweets below, and you can follow my Flickr feed or check the widget under CiL to see what I’ve posted there.

www.flickr.com

eclecticlibrarian's items tagged with libday6 More of eclecticlibrarian’s stuff tagged with libday6

social & scholarly communications, mixing it up

Scientific publisher Springer has been doing several things lately that make me sit up and pay attention. Providing DRM-free PDF files of their ebooks is one, and now I see they are providing rather useful bits of scholarly information in a rather social media format.

Springer Realtime gives currently trending topics and downloads for content they are serving out to subscribers around the world. The only thing that’s missing is a way to embed these nifty widgets elsewhere, like on subject guide pages.

NASIG 2010: Publishing 2.0: How the Internet Changes Publications in Society

Presenter: Kent Anderson, JBJS, Inc

Medicine 0.1: in dealing with the influenza outbreak of 1837, a physician administered leeches to the chest, James’s powder, and mucilaginous drinks, and it worked (much like take two aspirin and call in the morning). All of this was written up in a medical journal as a way to share information with peers. Journals have been the primary source of communicating scholarship, but what the journal is has become more abstract with the addition of non-text content and metadata. Add in indexes and other portals to access the information, and readers have changed the way they access and share information in journals. “Non-linear” access of information is increasing exponentially.

Even as technology made publishing easier and more widespread, it was still producers delivering content to consumers. But, with the advent of Web 2.0 tools, consumers now have tools that in many cases are more nimble and accessible than the communication tools that producers are using.

Web 1.0 was a destination. Documents simply moved to a new home, and “going online” was a process separate from anything else you did. However, as broadband access increases, the web becomes more pervasive and less a destination. The web becomes a platform that brings people, not documents, online to share information, consume information, and use it like any other tool.

Heterarchy: a system of organization replete with overlap, multiplicity, mixed ascendandacy and/or divergent but coextistent patterns of relation

Apomediation: mediation by agents not interposed between users and resources, who stand by to guide a consumer to high quality information without a role in the acquisition of the resources (i.e. Amazon product reviewers)

NEJM uses terms by users to add related searches to article search results. They also bump popular articles from searches up in the results as more people click on them. These tools improved their search results and reputation, all by using the people power of experts. In addition, they created a series of “results in” publications that highlight the popular articles.

It took a little over a year to get to a million Twitter authors, and about 600 years to get to the same number of book authors. And, these are literate, savvy users. Twitter & Facebook count for 1.45 million views of the New York Times (and this is a number from several years ago) — imagine what it can do for your scholarly publication. Oh, and NYT has a social media editor now.

Blogs are growing four times as fast as traditional media. The top ten media sites include blogs and the traditional media sources use blogs now as well. Blogs can be diverse or narrow, their coverage varies (and does not have to be immediate), they are verifiably accurate, and they are interactive. Blogs level that media playing field, in part by watching the watchdogs. Blogs tend to investigate more than the mainstream media.

It took AOL five times as long to get to twenty million users than it did for the iPhone. Consumers are increasingly adding “toys” to their collection of ways to get to digital/online content. When the NEJM went on the Kindle, more than just physicians subscribed. Getting content into easy to access places and on the “toys” that consumers use will increase your reach.

Print digests are struggling because they teeter on the brink of the daily divide. Why wait for the news to get stale, collected, and delivered a week/month/quarter/year later? People are transforming. Our audiences don’t think of information as analogue, delayed, isolated, tethered, etc. It has to evolve to something digital, immediate, integrated, and mobile.

From the Q&A session:

The article container will be here for a long time. Academics use the HTML version of the article, but the PDF (static) version is their security blanket and archival copy.

Where does the library as source of funds when the focus is more on the end users? Publishers are looking for other sources of income as library budgets are decreasing (i.e. Kindle, product differentiation, etc.). They are looking to other purchasing centers at institutions.

How do publishers establish the cost of these 2.0 products? It’s essentially what the market will bear, with some adjustments. Sustainability is a grim perspective. Flourishing is much more positive, and not necessarily any less realistic. Equity is not a concept that comes into pricing.

The people who bring the tremendous flow of information under control (i.e. offer filters) will be successful. One of our tasks is to make filters to help our users manage the flow of information.

history channel on foursquare

What kinds of information (historical or otherwise) can your library share with visitors/users through location-based networks like Foursquare and Gowalla?

The History Channel is on Foursquare, promoting their series America The Story of Us by putting tips on particular historical locations that include history trivia about the location. It got me to think about how libraries, or at least local collections, could do something similar with tidbits from their archives.

There have already been some examples of libraries inserting references to their digital collections on Wikipedia, and this is an opportunity to add some enhancement and self-promotion to a social media network that seems almost designed for this sort of thing. What kinds of information (historical or otherwise) can your library share with visitors/users through location-based networks like Foursquare and Gowalla?

where I spend my time online

While I was at the reference desk this quiet afternoon, I attempted to catch up on scanning through Lifehacker. Their article about the Geek Chart app caught my eye. Microblogging, or at the very least, in the moment stream of consciousness sharing, has taken over a good portion of my online presence, leaving this venue for slightly more substantial (and infrequent) commentary. So, I decided to fill out the details needed to build my Geek Chart.


Anna’s Geek Chart

Looks like those of you who want a more regular dose of Anna will need to be following my Twitter and Flickr feeds (with some Delicious thrown in). For the rest of you, enjoy the lighter load on your feed reader.

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