768 Wrap Up
I will admit that I’ve put off this last post. Not because I didn’t want to write it, but because the idea of ending this class just didn’t quite seem right. What we’ve learned here will continue to grow and evolve; it won’t really end.
I feel privileged to have taken this course with Michael Stephens, who is so clearly dedicated and passionate about librarianship and his role as teacher. His excitement about these topics was and is truly inspiring.
I plan to continue playing around with these new technologies (though, truthfully, I still can’t get the hang of Foursquare/Gowalla), but I think I’ve learned even more about myself and what makes me excited about being a librarian. I discovered my own passion for engaging patrons and non-users alike, and my research paper on oral history in the library started as just a glimmer of an idea and has turned into something I plan to pursue wherever I end up.
If fact, I wouldn’t call this a wrap up at all…
It’s just the beginning.
Connecting Past, Present, and Future: Digital Storytelling and Collective Memory in Public Libraries
Oral history, long considered an important aspect of the creation of collective memory, is an important way for people to connect with the past and one another. New technology has made it easier than ever to record and collect these stories digitally. This paper looks at the prospect of recording oral history in the library as one way technology is allowing users to become a part of the collection and changing their expectation of what the library is. Recording oral history in the library allows patrons to go from passive consumers of books and media to actively creating, sharing and engaging stories. The paper explores the projects of three libraries on the cutting edge of story collection: the Library of Congress’s American Folklife Center and StoryCorps project, Chicago Public Library’s Youmedia program for youth, and in the Netherlands DOK library’s Agora project. Literature is examined on oral history, Library 2.0, and the rise of a national oral history project in Chinese libraries. All libraries, large or small, have the ability to create successful oral history projects by listening to and engaging the community they serve.
View the paper here.
Literature Overview
Below is a list of literature resources I will be using for my research paper. I will be utilizing other sources for much of the information, but believe these items are more prevalent to the areas on oral history, collective memory, and libraries.
Barthel, Diane. Historic Preservation: Collective Memory and Historical Identity. Place unknown: Rutgers University Press, 1996.
Courtney, Nancy. Library 2.0 and Beyond: Innovative Technologies and Tomorrow’s User. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited, 2007.
Erstad, O. “Norwegian Students Using Digital Artifacts in Project-Based Learning.” Journal of Computer Assisted Learning 18, no. 4 (December 2002): 427-37. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=tfh&AN=8638876&site=ehost-live (accessed December 9, 2010).
Hamilton, Paula, and Linda Shopes, eds. Oral History and Public Memories (Critical Perspectives On The P). Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008.
Mackenzie, Christine. “Shanachie Tour Downunder.” inCite 30, no. 1 (January 2009): 26-27. http://ezproxy.dom.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx? direct=true&db=lih&AN=37365656&site=ehost-live&scope=site (accessed December 9, 2010).
Palevsky, Mary. “Questioning History: Personal Inquiry and Public Dialogue.” The Oral History Review 29, no. 2 (Summer-Fall 2002): 69-70. http://find.galegroup.com.turing.library.northwestern.edu/gtx/infomark.do?&contentSet=IAC-Documents&type=retrieve&tabID=T002&prodId=AONE&docId=A93534055&source=gale&srcprod=AONE&userGroupName=northwestern&version=1.0 (accessed December 9, 2010).
Rosenfeldt, Debra. “Great Public Libraries of the World: A Tour Summary.” Australasian Public Libraries and Information Services 22, no. 1 (March 2009): 26-31.
Seadle, Michael. “The Raw and the Cooked Among Librarians.” Library Hi Tech 16, no. 3 (1998): 7.
van de Geer, Jaap. “Innovation at Dok: Holland’s Library Concept Centre and Home of the Shanachies.” APLIS 23, no. 1 (March 2010): 38-40. http://search.ebscohost.com.turing.library.northwestern.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=tfh&AN=48791287&site=ehost-live (accessed December 9, 2010).
Zheng, Songhui. “Developing Oral History in Chinese Libraries.” The Journal of Academic Librarianship 34, no. 1 (January 2008): 74-78. 10.1016/j.acalib.2007.11.001.
I’m still looking for a few articles to round this out, but I have a good feeling that this will be the core of my literature section.
Group Project Thoughts and Reflection
First, let me apologize for posting late. I took Comcast’s outage last night as a sign that I needed to “unplug” and take a night to work on my crocheting.
This project taught me that meeting online can be just as difficult as meeting in person. Our group, Library Is Everywhere, struggled to find a good way to connect up with each other. Initially, our efforts focused on using the class group space to find a time and place to have a physical meeting. It became clear pretty early that due to our varied locations and work and class schedules, there was no good time for all of us. Then came the challenge of online meetings. Again, using the class group space, we began to search for a way to all meet at once virtually. By this time, though, we were all working on other projects and had a hard time even finding a mutually available spot for a chat. At this point, Melanie started a Google page for us to work on together. This really worked out well. We were all able to post our findings and thoughts and comment on one another’s ideas. Unfortunately, Google pages don’t offer an RSS feed like the class group space, so I found myself scouring the site to make sure I didn’t miss any new information. There was also the challenge Melanie mentioned in her post about the inability to have a real discussion about the project; we all contributed quite a bit, but feedback and responses to feedback were not always as quick as I would have liked.
Looking back, I now realize that we should have decided on a communication method that first weekend we met to ensure that we had at least one good way of discussing the project. This was my first group project handled entirely online, and I feel that it has taught me some valuable lessons.
Metropolis Public Library Social Media Policy (Draft)
I wanted my social media policy to inspire and empower employees. It was important to make it known that they were encouraged to “be the face” of the library through social media, while at the same time protecting the privacy of those employees who may not wish to make their accounts public. I also wanted to emphasize the hyperlocal aspect of being involved in and with the neighborhood as a way to make the branches relevant to the people in the surrounding communities.
Metropolis Public Library Social Media Policy
Social media is a way for individuals to keep in touch, reach out to, and interact with friends, family, coworkers, acquaintances, and people with whom you share similar interests. Because of the broad spectrum of people with whom our employees interact through social media and the public nature of much of using social media, the library has implemented the following policy. The policy is not meant to police or hinder, but to help us all understand how to best utilize this media as we are each the face and spokesperson of the library and our branches.
Each branch will have its own blog, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube account and is encouraged to promote events not only at the library, but in the branch’s neighborhood. It is important that the branches are not just in the neighborhood, but act as a part of the neighborhood.
For personal accounts of those associated with the library, we ask that you adhere to the following guidelines in respect to social media:
Choose
If you’d like to be a face of the library on social media, come see your branch’s Participatory Services Librarian to get set up. Links to your associated accounts will be posted on the library website along with your name, photo, and title. This is a great way for our patrons to reach us and get to know us.
If you’d like your social media sites to remain private, that request will be respected by the library. Those wishing to remain private are still expected to follow the social media guidelines when posting about the library.
Check
Check to see what others are saying about our library through social media. Did someone just tweet about a great program they attended? Is someone upset about not having enough bike parking? Some patrons will never tell us directly how they feel, but will share it on social media. Checking for posts, good and bad, can help us to know when a program was successful and also to address an issue or concern.
Engage
Engage users’ questions and concerns. Ask questions; post helpful links; add value. Remember, we’re librarians; we’re here to help and inform!
Help
If you notice a problem you can fix, do it. Timeliness is important on social media, and the earlier a problem is confronted the better. We never want unhappy patrons.
If you can’t fix it, see if someone else can.
Respect
Yourself
Your colleagues
Our patrons
Copyright
Accept
Accept responsibility for your own actions.
Think
Think before you type. While social media can seem like the perfect place to vent and share rumors, what you say can have a long lasting effect on you and the library.
If you’re ever unsure whether something can be shared via social media (such as ideas for future programming or offerings), please speak with your supervisor.
Ask
The library is a place to learn. If you need help setting up an account or have questions about privacy settings, please see your Participatory Services Librarian.
Social media is also a way to learn by asking for help from your “friends” and “followers.” It’s called crowd sourcing (get a link here), and it can help you find a great place for lunch or answer a tricky reference question.
Question
There’s always room for change. If you have questions or concerns about this policy, please come speak with your Participatory Services Library. As with Web 2.0 this policy will be in “perpetual beta,” meaning that as current social media change and new ones pop-up, the policy may be altered to meet new concerns or questions. Staff will always be alerted to any changes when they arise.
Read
Always read use policies of social media sites before signing up to ensure that you’re comfortable with them.
Read your employee manual. Any guidelines for behavior expressed in the manual also apply to your use of social media, including language use and patron interactions.
Remember
Have fun! Social media is a way to express yourself and to help and engage patrons.
Resources consulted in drafting this policy:
Brand Monitoring: Chicago Public Library
I saw this assignment of “brand monitoring” a library as a way to explore how the library chose to interact with its users. I wanted to see how the library not only informed, but engaged its users through the use of the library’s blog, Twitter feed, Facebook page, and Flickr photostream. I decided not to include user review sites like Yelp because, for me, this assignment gave me more of an opportunity to view the library’s use of social media tools to interact.
I chose to monitor the obvious choice of Chicago Public Library, not out of laziness or lack of options, but because I have been a dissatisfied subscriber to the CPL blog’s RSS feed and was hoping to see some better use of social media. Chicago Public Library is on all of the sites that I looked at: Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr to varying degrees of success.
The Blog
First, let’s look at the blog, Beyond Words. Here’s a screengrab of what my RSS reader looked like the entire length of this project.
This is not to say that the library doesn’t blog somewhat regularly, but the RSS feed bundles all of the posts from the month and sends them out at the end. So, I received all of the blog posts from October in a big lump around the first of November. Why CPL chooses to update in this manner, I can’t figure out. I do enjoy the blog and find it quite informative on new books and suggested reading, but feel that a quick, weekly note in my reader would keep CPL more in my thoughts instead of one jumbo post that I often don’t have the time to read thoroughly.
There is also no place for user comments on the blog website, so this appears to be used as a tool to inform, but not to engage or interact.
Twitter
CPL’s twitter page @chipublib also appears to be mostly a way for the library to get the word out on events and news with a few links to books and authors.
Toward the end of my monitoring time, I did discover that CPL actually had *another* Twitter account under their “Not What You Think” brand that appears to be the “fun” Twitter account.
It did seem to post more engaging and fun tweets, but I couldn’t find any recent replies to these posts. If they were to ask me, I would suggest just using the main account for all tweets.
There does appear to be one CPL worker, @stray, who takes it upon himself to respond to tweets about the library.
Facebook
Here CPL does a bit of a better job of responding to questions and comments posted by users. As a “friend” of the library, I find this their best use of social media tools for keeping me up to date on happenings.
Flickr
CPL’s Flickr stream, again under their “Not What You Think” moniker, hasn’t been updated since May of this year. The profile offers no information about the library, and really seems more like a place to store images of posters than anything else.
All in all, I was disappointed in CPL’s use of these tools. I know that the organization is really struggling with budgetary cutbacks and staffing shortages, so asking anyone to take on another task could be perceived as too much to ask. On the other hand, there are probably many other employees out there like @stray who enjoy using these media and would willingly take the time to update these pages and engage users through these free outlets. Although, the bureaucracy of a large institution like CPL might hinder the ability of workers and librarians to have a hand in “official” pages.
Using technology to create a richer history
On a really hot day this past summer, my grandfather remarked that this summer was almost as hot as the summer of 1936. When I showed surprise that he specifically remembered a hot summer from his childhood, he began to tell me the most amazing story of his life on a farm in central Illinois during the Depression. This got me thinking about the richness of collective memory. In the past, history was recorded through books and more recently film, both expensive and time-consuming; only a small portion of history has ever been recorded. Today, we have the opportunity to capture stories like those of my grandfather’s to create a much richer understanding of history as seen through the eyes of those who were there.
Today, libraries are in the perfect place to create repositories of collective memory. Most of our patrons will never publish a book, but this doesn’t mean they don’t have a story to tell or a passion to share. Some libraries are beginning to embrace this concept, as we saw in the DOK library’s “Your Life” storyboard. This idea, though, can and should be embraced by libraries around the world. A large budget and fancy sound studio are not required. Patrons can share by creating videos, posting photos, etc.
For my research paper, I will be looking at the ways social media is allowing users to become part of the collection, and changing their expectation of what the library is. It will no longer just be a place from which we take, but a place where we give to and share with our communities and our world. I’ll be looking at what some libraries are already doing (DOK, Library of Congress, CPL’s YouMedia), and how these projects can translate to various libraries across the country.
Virtual Communities
When I first began reading and thinking about virtual communities, I wasn’t sure if I had really ever been a member of one. Of course I interact with people online, but these people are almost entirely my “real world” friends, family, and classmates. As I began to read more, though, I realized that I am a member of many communities, albeit mostly as a “lurker” or at best a lurking learner. I contribute sporadically to sites like Yelp and VegWeb, but I’m much more likely to read other’s reviews and contributions than to post my own. I’ve even struggled with how to handle what I considered a breach of trust in an online community when I began receiving politically charged forwards from a seller on Etsy, a community of buyers and sellers of handmade goods. So, I guess that we find our way as members of these communities much as we find our way in physical communities. We hang around, look around, maybe say something every once in a while, and before you know it, someone’s talking politics and you’re looking for a polite way to run away. 
My first encounter with an online community was similar, but I was more invested. As a teenager when we got our internet connection, I had little to search for beyond the band or musician I was listening to that week (not that I could actually listen to the music online, but I did like to see if someone might take pity on central Illinois and actually play a show in the area). One of the musicians had a pretty active chat room on her sight, and I was intrigued that these people from around the country were “talking” to each other. Just as is mentioned in the Techlearning article, I did seem to progress up the ladder of involvement. At one point, there was a group of 5-10 of us who wandered in most nights. We rarely discussed the artist whose site we’d claimed as our own, but instead talked about ourselves and had conversations like I would have had with any of my other friends. I’m not sure how long this lasted, but I do know that these connections slowly tapered off over time. Now over a decade later, I couldn’t tell you any of their names.
The Evolving Hyperlinked Library
The Evolving Hyperlinked Library is about building a bridge. This bridge is bringing together community members and connecting them to the wider world.
The Unquiet Library at Creekview High School, Georgia brings a sense of community through activities and participatory learning. Students are no longer sitting quietly reading assignments, but are actively engaged in the learning process through collaboration, participatory library classrooms, and social spaces that can lead to a learning not taught in the classroom (note the comments section where we learn that the coffee bar is run by the special education department). While it’s true that not all of these skills can be quantified on a standardized test, the students are learning to be engaged in the world, a skill that will ultimately serve them far beyond the classroom.
Hyperlocal Libraries acquaints us with libraries that are hyperlocal, focused on providing information about and for the library’s immediate community. Hartford, CT, Hamilton, Ontario, and Loudon County, VA are all great examples of libraries connecting their users to valuable information concerning their local towns. This information, though, is not just available to the local communities, it’s on the web! It’s global! And, yes, there is probably not a huge global need for information on the happenings of Loudon County, VA, but the site can provide valuable information for someone considering vacationing in the area. The local websites for the local communities are also offering information to non-local tourists. From my personal experience, learning about an area before visiting allows me to find new places to visit, explore, and spend money.
With all that is happening and going into the creation of these evolving hyperlinked libraries, it is becoming imperative that library workers and directors are familiar with the technology that is making this bridge possible. David Armano’s 10 Questions should become the new go-to questions for interviews. After all, no library is an island. It’s time to create some bridges.
Little Brother
“The possibility of surveillance, whether direct or through access to records of speech, research and exploration, undermines a democratic society.” – ALA
Cory Doctorow is concerned about the future. Not concerned in the Fox News “run around screaming about everything bad that could theoretically happen” sort of way, but in the “civil liberties are being taken away every day in the name of security and freedom, and we’re not paying enough attention to notice or care” sort of way. How does he plan to raise awareness and bring about change? Why, young adult fiction, of course.
Throughout the fictional action and intrigue of his award winning novel, Little Brother, Doctorow weaves the real story of a government monitoring its citizens in the name of homeland security. After San Francisco’s Bay Bridge is blown up by terrorists, the Department of Homeland Security begins patrolling the city’s streets. In the wrong place at the wrong time, 17-year-old Marcus and his friends are arrested, tortured, and interrogated for days before being released into an almost unrecognizable city. The DHS has begun to monitor everyone’s every move through video surveillance, credit cards, bus passes, and Internet activity. Marcus, a budding hacker, feels it is his duty to fight back and expose what’s really happening: people are being frightened, coerced, and bullied by their own government without making the country any safer. During the course of Marcus’s fight, readers learn about data mining, “the paradox of the false positive,” cryptography, and Bayesian analysis.
What does this have to do with libraries? More than we might expect on the surface. Of course, we all know that libraries and librarians are ardent defenders of free speech, but it goes beyond that. Libraries provide access to information while protecting a patron’s right to privacy. As monitoring becomes easier and seemingly more prevalent, it will be the job of the library to not only protect but also to inform. It’s important for us as librarians to be vocal about our actions and let our patrons know we are doing everything we can to protect their privacy. It is my belief that every person who gets a library card should also get a copy of the library’s privacy policy. We should be informing patrons about their rights (and lack thereof) under the Patriot Act and how that affects library use and policy. It’s not about scaring the patrons; it’s about giving them the information they need and the opportunity to understand. It’s being concerned about the future.
Download the book for free here
Cory Doctorow’s Bio
Related Reading
Five Technically Legal Signs for Your Library
ALA Privacy Toolkit
Electronic Frontier Foundation on Social Network Monitoring
Portia Kapraun