LibGuides: A personal plug from a future librarian

I was initially introduced to LibGuides in 2009 shortly after the software had been adopted by SJSU librarians.  Although a librarian introduced the LIS subject guide in an email, I quickly forgot about it.  I didn’t think about LibGuides again until last semester when I introduced them to other students during library instruction and reference sessions as well as had the opportunity to co-create a guide myself during my student internship.  I quickly became a LibGuides fan, probably even more as a future librarian than a student.

When teaching library instruction sessions, I first used the guides as a starting point, a place to direct students when beginning their research (instead of the library’s website).  All of the students were upper level or graduate students in the health or biological sciences working on some kind of research paper.  Not having a science background, I found the LibGuides for these subjects to be fantastic teaching tools especially in the area of suggesting subject-specific databases to use.  I myself could follow a guide and walk students through the process thereby increasing awareness of the guides and teaching how to search effectively as well.

Another part of my internship required manning the main reference desk once a week.  I found that by consulting the appropriate subject-specific LibGuide (of which there are currently over 200), I could find a good starting place for research to share with students of any major that came to the desk seeking help.  

The most fun came though when I got to work on creating a new LibGuide with one of my supervisors.  I found the software very easy to work with; after a little reading, viewing a tutorial or two, and playing around with it, I was excited to add and change links and information until the guide became a finished product, ready to publish (since I have no programming or website creation background, I was relieved at the fairly low learning curve required).  The great thing is that because LibGuides are never really finished products, when it inevitably came time to make some changes, it was a snap to do so.  (At the time I didn’t add any RSS feeds because I didn’t actually know how to use RSS, but I’d love to try this out in the future.)  Academic content is dynamic and a tool such as LibGuides makes keeping on top of that content a much easier task.

The annual subscription fee for LibGuides ranges from $899 to $2,999 which can be prohibitive for some libraries.  But especially if an academic library can afford the software, I see it as a worthwhile expenditure and valuable aid for both students and librarians. 

Exercise 2 – Library Blogs: A Whole New World

The first five . . .

The following summarizes various characteristics of five library-related blogs I am currently following:

In the Library With the Lead Pipe

• Authors: seven different librarians representing public, academic, and school libraries; group post every few months; allows guest bloggers; “each article is peer-reviewed by at least one external and one internal reviewer”.
• Content: varied topics related to libraries.
• Recent topics: part-time temporary library jobs, Facebook, disappearance of books, WikiLeaks, student library & technology use study results.
• Most recent post: 2/9/11 post; updated every two weeks.
• Narrative and tone: some posts are first-person; some are third-person; more formal; reads like an article.
• Average post length: quite long so that only one post will fit on a page – the most recent post took 12 page scrolls from top to bottom.
• Graphics: each post typically begins with a colorful photo and uses bold headings to delineate content sections.
• Live links: yes, but not overwhelmingly so; depends on author.

The Librarian’s Commute

• Author: community college librarian.
• Content: libraries and technology, higher education.
• Recent topics: weeding printed books, researching a reference question, fear of computers/technology, beginning of semester busy-ness, negativity about librarianship. 
• Most recent post: 2/15/11 post; updated weekly.
• Narrative and tone: first-person; informal; conversational; posts are mini stories based on author’s reference desk observations.
• Average post length: about four paragraphs; a quick read.
• Graphics: each post typically begins with a colorful photo.
• Live links: sometimes a few. 

The Distant Librarian

• Author: university librarian.
• Content: Library 2.0 tools, technology and libraries.
• Recent topics: many posts are short snippets with links to other people’s content about technology and libraries, e.g., an eBooks and libraries presentation, a mobile library site post, technology book reviews.
• Most recent post: 2/9/11 post; updated quite sporadically, anywhere from five days to three weeks or more.
• Narrative and tone: first-person; informal.
• Average post length: one to four short paragraphs; a quick read.
• Graphics: some posts have a colorful graphic; some video.
• Live links: about 2-4; also a list of three more links at bottom of each post.

Librarian by Day

• Author: public librarian.
• Content: technology and libraries.
• Recent topics:  top ten personal links; eBooks and libraries, PostPost, OITP digital literacy announcement, librarian superhero contest.
• Most recent post: 2/13/11 post; updated every 2-3 days.
• Narrative and tone: first-person; informal; conversational.
• Average post length: most are two to four paragraphs, a few are fairly long – the most recent post required 4 page scrolls from top to bottom.
• Graphics: most posts have at least one colorful graphic or video.
• Live links: can range from one to many depending on content.

David Lee King

• Author: public librarian.
• Content: social web, emerging trends, libraries.
• Recent topics: library mobile app, social media use questions, making videos, Addict-o-matic.
• Most recent post: 2/17/11 post; updated every 2-4 days.
• Narrative and tone: first-person; informal; conversational.
• Average post length: most are four to eight paragraphs.
• Graphics: most posts have at least one colorful graphic or video.
• Live links: typically 0-4.

The first blog, In the Library With the Lead Pipe, strikes me as the one most different from the rest:  several authors as opposed to one; a tone more formal than conversational; unusually long posts that read more like articles as opposed to short, concise observations or chunks of information.  Other general differences amongst the blogs:  authors – academic vs. public librarians; frequency of new posts – some are updated every few days while others are updated twice a month or less; content – most concentrate heavily on tech and Library 2.0 issues while some cover other general library topics as well.

After reviewing these five blogs (having never previously been a reader of blogs), it became clear to me that I prefer a format composed of concise observations and ideas.  I like to scan and skim for information, and therefore am most comfortable with bite-size bits of it; long posts that require a lot of scrolling lose my interest quickly.  I also very much appreciate the informal, conversational tone of writing evident in some of the blogs.  My favorite of these is easily The Librarian’s Commute due to the author’s engaging story-like style of writing and the fact that her personality comes through in her weekly accounts of academic librarianship.

               

Three more of interest . . .

For this blogging exercise, I am also subscribed to and following three additional library-related blogs of my choice:

iLibrarian

Author:  Ellyssa Kroski, college librarian (also an adjunct SJSU SLIS faculty member).

Subsection of Online Education Database; updated several times each week.  While the author doesn’t offer her own content, what I like about this blog is that she alerts readers to interesting articles “on Library 2.0 and the information revolution” by providing very brief summaries with links, thereby allowing the choice of which ones to read in more depth.

Information Wants To Be Free

Author:  Meredith Farkas, university librarian (another adjunct SJSU SLIS faculty member).

Updated 2-3 times per month.  Topics run the gamut from various facets of librarianship and library services to info lit instruction to tech trends and libraries.  While the posts are lengthy, the topics and writing are very thought-provoking. 

Librarian In Black

Author:  Sarah Houghton-Jan, public librarian.

Updated 2-3 times per month.  This author’s tongue-in-cheek sense of humor really comes through in her posts about libraries and digital services.  Until recently I also appreciated her posts about services at the San Jose Public Library (since I am a patron); alas she has since moved on to a library north of San Francisco, but I won’t hold that against her and will continue to follow her blog.

From my viewpoint, these three blogs are all successful.  What makes a blog successful?  The fact that somebody chooses to read it.  So in my eyes these blogs are successful because I choose to follow and read them.  The reasons for my choices?

iLibrarian:

Reason 1. Interesting content – links to Library 2.0 and information topics, both of which I have an interest in.

Reason 2. Brief, concise posts that I can easily skim and choose from.

Information Wants To Be Free:

Reason 1. Interesting content – often about social software and tech trends, two of my interests.

Reason 2. This blog breaks the usual mold for the length of posts I prefer to read, but I thoroughly enjoy the author’s subject knowledge and exceptional style of writing; it makes me think and I appreciate that.

Librarian In Black:

Reason 1. Interesting content – digital library services, again an interest of mine.

Reason 2. Author’s humorous style of writing – I always a good chuckle.

The common theme here is that content is king; my greatest interests lie in all things digital and technological when it relates to libraries.  Secondary, but nevertheless important, characteristics affecting whether or not I choose to read a blog include brevity and conciseness of posts (unless the author’s writing style is particularly engaging), a conversational writing tone (humor goes a long way), and the ability of the author to connect with the reader on some level.

Blogging and those three little words . . .

No, not those three little words.  These three:  frequency, brevity, personality.  For my blogging assignment this week, I googled “what makes a good blog”.  References to these three words spoken by the creator of Blogger, Evan Williams, showed up in more than one result.

As I reviewed several of the “successful” blogs listed for our assignment, I kept these three words in mind.  I quickly skimmed through seven of the blogs listed because I am a skimmer, not a reader.  As such I realized immediately that the blogs that were most attractive to me right off the bat were the ones that were obviously short and succinct, concise bite-size chunks often no longer than two or three paragraphs (librarian.net; Tame The Web, Seth Godin’s Blog).  Regardless of content, I might be inclined to view any of these simply based on their brevity.

Kudos also to ReadWriteWeb and Gizmodo for their cool use of graphics and videos.  As I am a skimmer, I do appreciate interesting visual aids.

In terms of frequency, I appreciated that all seven blogs were updated regularly by their authors, the most impressive with multiple daily posts (ReadWriteWeb, Tame The Web).

As far as personality, I’m not sure I could comment on that at this point without reading (not skimming) more of each of these blogs.  But based on the brevity and visual attractiveness alone of the aforementioned five blogs, I’d be interested in following all of them in the future to get to know their “personality” better.

Girl Scouts: An Inspirational Use of Social Media

Girl Scouts of the USA is a national nonprofit organization founded in 1912 that seeks to empower girls by helping them “build character and skills for success in the real world.”  While the group has dedicated itself to maintaining the same core values in place when I was a young Girl Scout, the organization has also kept up with the Internet age by maintaining an impressive online presence in today’s world of social media.  From the main website, you can get to several of their other related websites including the GS Cookie site dedicated solely to their yearly cookie sales.  This organization makes excellent use of various social media tools that are linked to from the website, including:  Twitter with over 5,000 followers; Facebook with over 36,000 fans; YouTube (the Girl Scout Videos channel has over 550 subscribers), and Blogger (the Girl Scout Blog is consistently updated daily M-F).  Even Girl Scout Cookies, besides having its own website, also has its own Facebook page with over 72,000 fans, as well as a GirlScoutCookieSale’s channel on YouTube.

But what I find most impressive and even inspirational about the Girl Scouts’ use of social media is the way in which the organization is also using it to teach business skills and values to scouts themselves.  Girl Scouts teaches girls how to use social media effectively and safely for marketing and business purposes.  The Girl Scouts’ online marketing guidelines indicate that scouts (13 and older) may use social media “to market product, as long as they have a parent/guardian’s permission, are under adult supervision, and follow Safety Checkpoints and Volunteer Packet guidelines.”  With Girl Scout Cookie sales quickly approaching, the Girl Scouts and their smart use of social media have been featured often in the news lately.  Through the direct experience of using social media to support their cookie sales, scouts themselves will have the opportunity to learn about social media use in business first hand.

Exercise 1 - Kara's Cupcakes

Kara’s Cupcakes is a small business founded by Kara Lind in 2005 that sells cupcakes at six locations throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.  I first enjoyed these cupcakes at a birthday party and had to find out where to get more.  Then I happened to watch an episode of Cupcake Wars on the Food Network, in which Kara competed and almost won.  I had to have some cupcakes after that, so I visited the San Jose store and confirmed that hers were the best I’ve ever tasted (and no, I don’t have a relationship with the company; I just love their cupcakes!).  So I decided to find out more about how this small business is using social media.

What’s the buzz?

To find out what people are saying about Kara’s Cupcakes online, I began by using the social monitoring tool, Social Mention (www.socialmention.com), which resulted in 176 mentions. 

The following scores were calculated for Kara’s Cupcakes:  1. 1% strength which supposedly indicates the likelihood that a brand is being discussed in social media; being that Kara’s is a small local business, this score is not surprising; 2. 70:1 sentiment which indicates the ratio of mentions that are positive to those that are negative; this ratio fits with the majority of posts I read about Kara’s; 3. 16% passion which indicates the likelihood that those talking about a brand will do so repeatedly; and 4. 15% reach indicating how many unique customers are discussing the brand.  Although this tool lists a breakdown of many different sources, I focused mainly on Google Blog Search, Twitter, and Facebook.

On the first page of 50 Google Blog results, 10 different blogs over just two days mention Kara’s Cupcakes and the enjoyment of them, so it appears that people like the products enough to blog about them.  A direct search for Kara’s Cupcakes on Google Blog itself resulted in 17,400 hits.  Randomly skipping to pages 10 and 28, I found more mostly positive comments about eating the cupcakes.  I’m guessing most people who blog about Kara’s Cupcakes on their personal blogs do so if they like the cupcakes; I didn’t come across many negative blogs at all.  Regarding specifics about what customers are saying about Kara’s, the majority of statements are similar to the following examples:  “Nothing better than a cupcake at Kara's. I had the coconut filling + chocolate cake and it was divine!”  “We left the store with four different cupcake flavors: fleur de sel, neopolitan, banana caramel and passion fruit cupcake. They were as awesome as we remembered it to be.”

Using Social Mention’s results, I also browsed 14 recent customer tweets, basically all of which mention trying Kara’s Cupcakes and liking them.  Although only six Facebook entries were listed for the last two weeks, they were all also positive regarding the cupcakes.

Next I checked out the social monitoring tool How Sociable? (www.howsociable.com).  This site provides an overall visibility score (unsure about the value of this), as well as a number of boxes representing various social media tools such as Twitter, that show a brand’s social media activity.  Yahoo Images contains 1,500 images, many of cupcakes, posted by customers; Flickr contains 108 images, mostly cupcakes posted by customers; YouTube contains 12 videos posted by satisfied customers enjoying their cupcakes on camera; the Twitter results showed only six recent tweets in which those tweeting appear to be doing so using other social media including Foursquare and LikeList to originate their tweets.  (I also tried searching Tweet Scan for customer tweets but it produced zero results.)  Overall I did not find How Sociable? to be as helpful a social monitoring tool in this case; perhaps it would be more valuable for a company with a larger online social presence.

Finally, I reviewed recommendations on Yelp for “kara’s cupcakes” but since there are six locations, I chose the San Jose store to review more closely.  Out of 581 reviews for this store, the average rating was 3 out of 5 stars.  Most lowered starred comments centered on the priciness of the cupcakes and the taste (too sweet, too dry, other cupcakes were better); there were also some complaints about this particular store’s service, its tininess, and a smaller selection of flavors.  The five other locations all had an average of 3 ½ or 4 stars each.  With the volume of local reviews for each store on Yelp, this tool may be the best indicator of what people really think about the bakery and its cupcakes, and something for the company to keep an eye on.  

Let’s give them something to talk about . . .

Kara’s Cupcakes has a website at www.karascupcakes.com.  The home page is uncluttered so the links to their Facebook and Twitter pages are easily noticeable, as well as the option to subscribe to their email list.  This is the extent of social media actually present on the website.

Kara’s Facebook page shows close to 11,000 “people like this”.  There is at least one wall posting a day (sometimes two or more) by the company that advertises an event or just the cupcakes in general, e.g. “Don't fumble and forget to pick up your Super Bowl 6-pack. Pre-order your Steelers or Packers logo cupcakes today!”  Every posting has at least three or more comments, and they seem to be from customers usually praising their cupcakes.  There are also daily postings by customers, the majority of which are positive.  When a question is asked either in a posting or in the comments, an employee does respond back most of the time though this could be more consistent.  When there are complaints, Kara’s does respond back in a positive way, as shown in the following example:  “Kara's Cupcakes so sorry to hear that.... We will take your input and keep baking more! Thanks for the info....”

Kara’s Twitter page currently shows 3,781 followers.  The company’s daily tweets are basically the same as their Facebook postings, with additional tweets about where the Karavan, their mobile cupcake bakery, will be stopping next to sell cupcakes.  This serves as a way to get the word out and excite followers about the Karavan.

Facebook and Twitter are the only two social media tools that Kara’s Cupcakes seem to really be proactively using to communicate with customers.  I think for a small company such as this one, it represents a good start.  Customers do seem to be responding and creating content of their own regarding this company, I think mostly because they like the cupcakes.  But while both social media tools are updated at least once daily, I would like to see a company blog created or a bit more personalized postings on Facebook and Twitter (rather than event listings) to help create more of a two-way conversation between Kara’s and their customers.  Because Kara’s is small and local, using social media and more of it, could be very effective in boosting business in the future. 

Tags:  exercise1

Library 2.0: More questions than answers . . .

Five of the seven required readings for this week were written four or more years ago (2006 & 2007); social software and networking have exploded since that time which makes me wonder how many librarians still think of social software as a fad or continue to downplay the concept of Library 2.0.  What I’ve learned through this week’s readings is that Library 2.0 is not just about promoting the library using whatever social software technology is popular at the moment; the ideas behind it are more about cultivating relationships with patrons and their communities.  This means resisting the urge to slap up a Facebook page that lists library events assuming that patrons will suddenly be interested just because the library now has a presence in Facebook.  Meredith Farkas, a guest at a Library 2.0 Gang 12/09 podcast discussing social software in libraries (http://librarygang.talis.com/), points out librarians sometimes wonder why no one comments on their blogs; she suggests that there may be nothing of interest in their blogs on which to comment.  The most interesting concept about Library 2.0 for me at this point then, is figuring out how to use these social software tools to connect and converse with patrons about what’s important to them, i.e., maintain a two-way conversation rather than just deliver a library’s information.

I believe in 2011 that most librarians are coming to the realization that attention needs to be paid to the ideas behind Web 2.0 and Library 2.0.  At this point, it’s important to ask questions:  What do we do with these ideas and technologies in terms of our libraries?  What’s our intent in using these tools?  How do we use them effectively to form relationships with our patrons, rather than just as promotional tools?  Planning before implementation is the key to success; this idea is also discussed in the Library 2.0 Gang podcast mentioned above.   This is not to say that libraries should not endeavor to try out new technologies for fear of failure, but rather to exercise caution in jumping on the bandwagon every time some new software comes out. 

Not enough time in a day . . .

My online escapades consist mostly of working on my MLIS degree, reviewing email, checking this week’s weather, and managing my library account.  While pursuing my online degree, I have participated in using wikis, creating screen casts, and interacting with patrons via chat reference.  These are tools I’ve used for my coursework but not on a regular basis.  Therefore the extent of my daily activities using social software is generally limited to checking email; while I have three different accounts, only one is used primarily for keeping in touch with friends and colleagues, while the other two are used as aggregators for school forum messages.

The main reason I’ve shunned social software on a personal level is my perception of the time involved using it.  Once I’m online, I tend to go into addiction mode:  checking email every half hour, clicking on interesting sounding hyperlinks, reading news and entertainment blips, searching anything and everything, etc.  Therefore if I set up a social networking account such as Facebook, I would undoubtedly invest a significant amount of time checking it repeatedly throughout the day.  This is a predicament for me since I often feel that I should be spending the majority of my time doing just about anything else besides being online.  So it remains to be seen how I’ll do budgeting my time after I’ve delved further into the world of social software, and especially social networking.