Maker Culture in the media
In my earlier post on MiniSoOnCon I mentioned that journalism students from Ryerson and UWO were covering the event as part of a project on Maker Culture. You can now see the first part of the series on rabble.ca and The Tyee.
Social media rules of engagement
I just discovered an excellent post by Alisa Leonard-Hansen (Vice Chair, Communications at the DataPortability Project) on the importance of governance models in the creation of social media strategies.
The considerations for a social media governance model are numerous: brand identity/voice/tone, internal resources, staffing and stakeholders, work-flow adjustments, escalation policies, appropriate topics of conversation and language, identity/social equity “ownership” (who does brand social equity belong to? The employee Tweeting on behalf of a brand or the brand?), legal issues and rammifciations, industry regulations, content posting policies….well you get the point. While this may seem a bit of an arduous task, creating these governance models lay a crucial foundation, and are vital to any social media–ahem, digital– strategy and long term success (and they’re actually fun to create too, believe it or not).
Explaining to someone unfamiliar with social media how to deal with and distinguish between trolls and legitimate complaints and appropriate levels of response is difficult, as the internet is a realm with a sociology of its own distinct from our everyday experience. Alisa’s example of the Rules of Engagement visual for the US Air Force provides any librarian working on social media strategy a clear and succinct means to do this.
Google Wave in education and libraries
Since the launch of Google Wave, there seems to be confusion about how best to use it. However, The Chronicle of Higher Education looks at attempts by colleges to engage with the technology in light of earlier predictions that it could replace course management software.
Ray Schroeder gave it a try last semester at the University of Illinois at Springfield, one of the first colleges to use Wave for online teaching since the preview version came out in September. For about two weeks in December, he joined his “Internet in American Life” course with a class on energy studies at the Institute of Technology at Sligo, in Ireland. They created a “wave” to discuss the impact of the Internet on energy sustainability.
But what if you merged a biology class and a philosophy class? You could have them evaluate a bioethics case study, suggests Mr. Schroeder, director of the university’s Center for Online Learning, Research, and Service. Or what about a class on Asian history? You could use Wave’s translation tool and hook up with a group of Chinese students.
What about libraries? Well, over at the UKOLN’s Cultural Heritage blog there is an analysis of how Google Wave has been received by librarians in the United Kingdom, where it seems that, like the rest of us, they intend to “wait and see”.
Overall, whilst interest in Wave was high, there was a degree of scepticism regarding how useful it is to librarians. Tellingly, some respondents felt that there are not enough extensions for Wave to make it useful to librarians yet and that nobody has actually found a valuable practical use for Wave in libraries at this point. One respondent went as far as to state that Wave has yet to be used for anything beyond time wasting. On the whole, respondents seemed happy to let Wave develop and let other people find uses for it before they approach it with any seriousness.
Are Britain’s libraries sleepwalking into the future?
Britain’s culture minister Margaret Hodge published a paper today, Empower, Inform, Enrich - The modernisation review of public libraries: A consultation, looking at the direction libraries should take in the future.
The consultation paper includes 30 essays offering different views of what the important issues are, from people including authors Tracy Chevalier and Michael Rosen; Random House Chair and Chief Executive Gail Rebuck, Starbucks MD Darcy Willson-Rymer; and many others. It also poses a series of questions upon which the DCMS seeks views from as wide a range of people as possible including the library and publishing community.
According to The Guardian, elements of the paper could become policy early next year, and it is obvious that Hodge believes libraries in Britain require a radical shift in their priorities if they are to survive.
The incredible rise of easy internet access and use means that libraries simply have to compete and perform more effectively if they are to justify the public investment they need. Sleepwalking into the era of the iPhone, the eBook and the Xbox without a strategy, runs the risk of turning the library service into a curiosity of history like telex machines or typewriters.
Can libraries learn from The Rocky Mountain News?
Here is a thought provoking presentation by John Temple, former editor, president and publisher of The Rocky Mountain News. Founded in 1859, The Rocky Mountain News was Colorado’s oldest newspaper. However, it published its final edition on February 27, 2009. It was the first major paper to close after the economic crash and Temple outlines the events that led to the paper’s closure, many of them related to the paper’s inability to deal with new technologies. He believes that the lessons he learned can be broadly applied, and I am sure librarians can draw insights from his presentation to help us understand our engagement with both emerging technologies and our users.
Temple’s ten lessons are as follows;
- Know what business you’re in.
- Know your customers.
- Know your competition.
- Know your goal.
- Have a strategy and be committed to pursuing it.
- Measure, measure, measure.
- Keep new ventures free from the rules of the old.
- Let the people running a new venture do what’s best for their business, regardless of the potential impact on the old.
- To compete in a new medium, you have to understand it.
- Invest in R&D.
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