Effective Use of Social Software to Promote, Describe, Discover, and Organize Government Information - Jodi Carlson, University of Minnesota, Duluth - Heather Tompkins, Carleton College - Amy West, University of Minnesota

Amy West:

social software: email, internet, IM, blogs, photo-sharing sites, RSS feeds/readers, social bookmarking, wikis, browser extensions, online software, podcasting

showed Flickr tag besttitleever of great government documents publications - Who Are the Zombie Masters and What Do They Want?

was skeptical about who would want to hear her talk about govdocs but is coming around to podcasting being a great idea for a target audience

professional development: keeping current Bloglines and Google Reader

sample of feeds she reads: lists from the government printing office
blog about free government information what people are asking FirstGov UN blog

figure out what you want to do and how and then find the tool that will do it

professional development: sharing expertise

put together links to publication catalogs for international organizations in del.icio.us

next speaker, Jodi Carlson – collaboration

using Yahoo Messenger because it’s free and it’s the only one that does conferencing (JL: I’m not sure this is right, but I have to find out what they mean by "conferencing") went to IM because VR software was too difficult and kept crashing use Trillian now because does gtalk and jabber (if you buy the pro version) highlighted Meebo

also mentioned Bloglines

next speaker: Heather Tompkins

believes blogs are most widespread form of social software

notes you can subscribe to colleagues’ bookmarks; she subscribes to some Furl accounts

showed Feed Reader

for upper-level students, interested in teaching them to use this for their research
helping them to subscribe to sites has found that many students use social software, but haven’t connected the dots to academic/research uses yet so can help them do this highlighting political blogs as a primary resource for political science blogs

two examples from Furl for course prep while she would prefer for classes, she would bookmark everything but it got out of control was constantly trying to reorganize them then she found Furl, where she can bookmark, categorize according to her own headings, clip excerpts, add comments, and more

highlighted Writely for group projects (talked about a group in a history class on campus using it)

is different from a wiki:
– wikis require an installation of software (JL: not technically true, but they corrected this later in the session)
– wikis require specialized markup

taking notes online and annotating sites:
Google Notebook and Scrapbook Firefox extension (unfortunately can’t share annotations with others yet)

showed one of her subject headings: “just because”

tips for finding and evaluating:
– monitor sites and blogs that frequently post information aobut new applications and tools
 –– ResearchBuzz, ResourceShelf, Search Engine Watch, Slashdot, lots of others
– ask other people what they are using
– Download.com
– work preferences
– computer use
– privacy
– physical environment
– preferences

recommend you ask patrons what they are using, just so you know, not necessarily so that you use everything
talk to your colleagues and find out what they are using

also mentions Google Page Creator and Google Spreadsheets
Gliffy (flowcharts)
Firefox/Thunderbird extensions (ColorZilla, feed readers, Thunderbird)

they tend to read their feeds at the desk – good time to do that

things that have come up in the last few days:
– had a student request statistics for U.S. aid to foreign nations for several years; used to get this from a publication they no longer carry, but there is a database of it on the web now from GPO. there is no acknowledgment of the db from GPO, though, so she needed a way to keep this link. put it into del.icio.us and then hopes to put these links on the departmental home page in the future
– department thought about moving from a paper calendar to online; looked at various online and software options, but went with Google Calendar because they could set up multiple ones at once and that they could customize it for each person but share links on each others’ calendars; have a link to the calendar on their home page so that students can see when they are available for help (made sure there are no details available publicly); another speaker mentioned PBwiki – that’s what they use for their calendar

don’t use something just to use it, don’t spend time on it if you don’t need it
that doesn’t mean don’t know what’s out there and don’t test things that might work for you
if something isn’t working for you, find something else

presentation is available at http://people.carleton.edu/~htompkin/MLA2006.ppt

JL: I liked how they used real-life examples. I'll have to steal some of them for my presentations :-p

I love Library Journal, and I have praised them in the past for opening up their articles for free on the web. If I was blogging more, I'd be linking to them more because they have some great content. You can tell they like publishing controversial editorials, too, with the current issue being an especially good example. Take a look at the following columns:

• The 21st-Century Dynamo by Thomas Washington
• Can ALA Bring Change? by John Berry
• Priorities & Professionalism by Sophie Brookover

These days, I feel like a laptop without an internet connection (especially a high-speed one) is just a brick. An article without a way to engage in conversation about it is a similar brick.

It's too bad I couldn't share my thoughts about these articles on the pages themselves. Unfortunately, you have to know that if you want to comment on Sophie Brookover's thoughts, you need to go to her blog post about it at http://www.popgoesthelibrary.com/2006/09/self-promotion-lj-nextgen-column.html. I guess there's just no way to share thoughts on John Berry's or Thomas Washington's columns unless you send a letter to the editor (print or electronic).

The problem is that this just doesn't work for me anymore. I actually had time this morning to write a quick comment of my initial response to each article. Instead of just typing in boxes on the LJ site, though, I've spent time writing this blog post, and LJ has lost my contribution to the discussions they were trying to promote by publishing these columns. I don't want to send a letter to one person so that it can be published later. I want to engage in a conversation with others right now who have strong reactions to these articles. I have no reason to come back to these pages to check on the discussions, because there aren't any. I wish there were.

This is one reason I encourage libraries to offer at least one blog (start with "what's new" at your library) and turn on the comments. You have patrons that feel this way about your website. Luckily, you can fix this pretty easily and for free.

Agree? Disagree? Leave a comment!

Update: LJ had this functionality in the works, and they've already added it to the three articles listed above. Thanks, Francine!