Internet Librarian 2008: Making a Difference with Digital Media

Internet Librarian 2008: Making a Difference with Digital Media
Greg Schwartz, Samuel Davis, and Joy Marlow

Greg Schwartz started the session by talking about people's online identities.  He recommends not only looking at all the places you have profiles or activity, but looking at what other people are saying about you.  Reputation online is more dependent on the latter.  A web search for your name (or your library's name) should hopefully bring back top results that apply to you and have accurate information.  Greg notes that we don't own our own online identities.  Greg defines personal branding as the actions you take to define who you are to others.  Six tips for managing your online brand:

1. Have a home base (a main online presence and identity).  He mentioned ClaimID, a site that lets you claim the sites that are yours and a site called  which also includes a section called Not Me where you can identify sites that aren't you.
2. Own your username.  Think about the selection of username and how that affects your brand.  Be consistent and use that name in every place. 
3. Aggregate your lifestream.  Use FriendFeed or other similar sites as a way to aggregate all of your online presences into one place - which also lets people subscribe to your activity in one place.
4. Join the conversation.  The best way to get yourself as a librarian out into the broader sphere of what librarians are doing online is to insert yourself into active conversations.  Comment, respond, participate.
5. Follow what others are saying about you.  Sign up for Google Alerts or RSS feeds to get notification when people have mentioned your name.  This gives you another avenue to participate - communicate with people.
6. Be authentic.  Be real.  Don't be all Fakey McFakey Pants. (my words, not Greg's)

Samuel Davis and Joy Marlow covered their work implementing web 2.0 projects at the Columbus Metropolitan Library.  Joy's title is Digital Experience Analyst, which I love - what a wonderful type of position to have at your library.  They started by talking about some of the challenges they faced integrating Web 2.0 into their web presence.  Selling ideas to administrators and staff is key, but sometimes difficult.  They also had to face a learning curve with each project - for example, learning how to use ContentDM to create and manage their digitized photographs and learning Drupal as a new website content management system.  Keeping up with new technology is also key - tracking trends and managing the projects you implement to be those with staying power.  You also have to bring your customers along - know what they want from your website and what their skills are.  3rd Party Vendors and technologies don't always work, and if you're at the mercy of that 3rd party you have to know that things will go wrong and you have no control over it.  You also need to read through Terms of Use with 3rd party vendors.  They are working with a copyright lawyer to make sure all the photos they are digitizing are okay to put up.  Google Maps requires that Google branding be on its maps on your site - remove it and you could get in trouble.  You need to have a clear strategy for implementation and an idea about how the project fits into the institution's larger mission.  Engaging staff is a great way to get the technologies into their work lives.  They've implemented Learn and Play at CML, based on the 23 Things model.  If you get some staff excited about something, they will pass that on to the other staff.  Engaging your customers is also important - trust your customers and listen to what they are seeing.  They created a Power Tools page on their website with a blog front and center.  Occasionally, they ask users to comment on a post about what technologies they think the library should use.  They created a library toolbar for users to download as well.  Joy emphasized the importance of finding a balance of technologies - enough for the techies but not too much to overwhelm those who aren't familiar with tech.  She also noted that you have to believe in what you do - that shows to others in your actions and will come across to both staff and users.  They recommend beta testing new technologies on the website - labeling it beta and asking for customer feedback.  They encourage prototyping - creating working models of what you want to create.  Give people something that they can see in order to make your case about what you want to do.  Let applications be torn apart as well.  Let customers use it, even if it's new and raw, and get customer feedback which then makes the tool better.  Samuel ended by saying that we shouldn't be afraid to fail - if something doesn't work, take it down.  It's OK.   

IL2008