Month: March 2008

Social Networking Sites

This past week I played with social networking sites (Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn). I must say, I didn’t think that I would enjoy this as much as I did. It was a lot of fun; and I even connected with friends and colleagues that I didn’t even know were using these sites!I absolutely love the library sites I visited on MySpace. If I were a teen in Denver, I would think I had the coolest public library around. Plus, I was really impressed by the number of teens who interacted with the site. The Brooklyn College Library  site is cool as well.Having previously worked in a hospital library, I know that the residents use Facebook and MySpace a lot when they’re on a break.  I know that there are some worries about privacy, but IT does doesn’t block those sites in the medical library. However, they are blocked in the community library (patients and visitors use this library). The medical library there has no plans to use these sites as far as I know.Where I am now, the library uses an internal wiki and has an application on Facebook that members can “subscribe” to  search their database without having to leave Facebook. They really have been exploring ways to reach their users, which is great. I also like the way my professional association (Medical Library Association) has used Facebook for its annual meeting. Although I can’t go, I really liked being able to see who was going. Some people who responded also had their pictures, so I could actually put a face to names I’ve been seeing for a long time. I really liked it as a networking tool.I didn’t do much with LinkedIn. I think because I had spent so much time on Facebook and MySpace, I just got a little tired! I signed up but haven’t done much else. Overall, I’d say that it was great playing with these sites. I’m still using MySpace (I already had an account) and Facebook (I just created a photo album). 

New Wiki

Last week I got an introduction to wikis. I’d visited wikis before but had never even considered contributing to one or starting one. I really like the editing features for group/team projects. I can see this working really well with documents that go through many changes before arriving at the finished product. I imagine that this would get more mileage than a blog–at least in the libraries where I’ve worked. For some reason, a blog seems more personal and more driven by the blog author. Wikis seem more communal.

Using Wet Paint was a little more frustrating since editing for me didn’t work well in Safari. I was able to do what I wanted when I switched to Firefox. That’s definitely a minus for me. I think I may try PB Wiki to see how it functions and whether it’s more Safari-friendly.

I will say that I definitely like the template choices for WordPress blogs better than the Wet Paint wiki templates.

The Value of Blogs in Medical Librarianship

I’ve been taking advantage of blogs in my work as a medical librarian for a while. I subscribe to quite a few and read them daily (sometimes twice daily) to keep up with what’s happening in the medical librarianship field as well as in technology advances, health policy and health reform. In the organization where I work now, there is no intranet, so a blog may not be doable unless we added one to our web site. Whether visitors to our web site would participate (or whether our own staff would participate) is another matter. Since many in the org tend to be technophobic, I know that I have to move very slowly to implement new things.