This morning the penny dropped. I’d been thinking about what was the most valuable thing I’d gained from doing this Web 2.0 project and realized that the sense of community I felt reading your blogs and corresponding online far outweighed the pluses or minuses of any of the sites or online tools I’d explored. Then I realized that this is exactly why we have online social networking, and that I belatedly have found an online social network that means something to me.
I’ve never enjoyed talk radio or even the comments that newspaper websites permit their readers to make. Too often people tend to forget their manners. So maybe it helps to already know the people you’re involved with online or at least to have something as important as your workplace in common. Thus far our fellow explorers have been generous with their knowledge and kind to their colleagues.
If our library started a blog for our patrons, would they have enough in common with each other and us to be able to build an online community too? As odd as it seems, we could even guide them through the some of the same explorations we’ve been doing. Or we could provide a forum for people to discuss their favorite books with each other or with us. We could even (gasp) provide a public forum for suggestions and complaints.
The key would be to stay involved ourselves: suggesting great new reads, plugging our reference services, and responding to suggestions with reasoned replies. Could we do it? I think we should try
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2 comments:
I'm there with you. I have much more of a sense of community with this 2.0 group than I ever expected. Perhaps part of it was a certain level of investment in the social part, not just in the opinion part as so often happens... There's a lot of emphasis in this project on working together and encouraging each other, and less on whether there's any actual disagreement.
I would like to see the library put together some web 2.0-isms for our patronage... But it's probably a good idea to have it be moderated and monitored, to a certain extent. (I can think of a few patrons who would think it was *hysterically* funny to post rude or inappropriate things...) Libraries always talk about how we want to be a community center, a meeting place, and it would simply be an extension of that attitude into the cyberworld.
...Plus, if you could get CEUs for participating (e.g. writing a staff book review, moderating a discussion), imagine how many volunteers we'd have! ;-)
Those are some great ideas, a.l. --especially the CEU part! We've hit a bit of a snag in our web exploration since the installation of Packeteer. This software prioritizes where the bandwidth goes, which means that the You Tube video in the 1st exploration is taking about half an hour to load. (We timed it yesterday afternoon.) Our ISS staff says that they can switch priorities but that it will mean overall slowness for our patrons, so they're talking about allowing it for the half hour before we open. It reminds me of those rural places in other countries where the generator is only turned on for a few hours a day.
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