Thursday, September 13, 2007

Librarians Learn Web 2.0

The librarians at the Lucy Robbins Welles Library are learning about the social web and new applications that we can use to improve service to our patrons.

One new project is the teen book review blog - Teen Reviews. Currently teens can fill out a comment card and one of our librarians will add their review to the blog. See what other teens are reading and what they think about the books. We hope in the near future teens will be able to post to this blog themselves.

The reference department has created an internal wiki for our reference polices, memos, FAQs, bookmarks. We watched this YouTube video from Commoncraft shows to learn about wikis



As part of the reference wiki our Head of Reference also created a Del.icio.us account with our frequently used bookmarks. You can check out the ReferenceDepartment Bookmarks to see what sites we often go to when we answer your questions. Commoncraft also has YouTube video on social bookmarking.



If you have any suggestions for web2.0 applications that the library could use to improve service please leave a comment on this post.

-vicky

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

Your library employs a new category of computer abuse – calendar spam. The online calendar on the town of Newington’s home page has been sprayed with the artificial event “Library Card Sign-up Month" on EVERY single day of the month of September 2007. Is this strategy a part of Web 2.0?

Anonymous said...

It would be useful to be able to transfer calendar events directly to a personal computer calendar. See CCSUs online calendar for this capability.

Anonymous said...

The name of the entity “Teen Reviews” does not include enough descriptive information. Including at least the name of your institution in the name would be useful. A consistent naming convention for all the various blogs at your institution might raise their stature.

Anonymous said...

The unstructured "ReferenceDepartment [sic] Bookmarks" contains many broken links. Calling them "frequently used bookmarks" constructs an obvious fabrication.

Anonymous said...

The post is labeled "delicious" - how bizarre!

Anonymous said...

The "Web 2.0" name is used interchangeably with the less preferable "Web2.0" on your site.

Anonymous said...

Your web page remains highly unstructured and disorganized containing confusing dialogs, abundant errors and unfilled promises of a future that never comes.

Vicky said...

Currently Town of Newington is upgrading it's website. We use the calendar feature of the towns website. I will pass along the request that the events on the site can sync with other electronic calendars.

Anonymous said...

" Anonymous said...

The unstructured "ReferenceDepartment [sic] Bookmarks" contains many broken links. Calling them "frequently used bookmarks" constructs an obvious fabrication."

The broken links are internal/Intranet links, which only work on the town network, not the Internet. They still might be frequently used. However, this is easy to spot and could have been easily avoided.

Anonymous said...

actually, that's brilliant. Thank you. I'm going to pass that on to a couple of people.