Thing 2 - Learning about Learning 2.0

I read John Blyberg's blog post - 11 reasons why Library 2.0 exists and matters and watched the Think Library 2.0 as You Watch This video.


Our library's first foray into Library 2.0 came after I read about Library Thing for Libraries (LTFL). I was already familiar with Library Thing as a great resource so the ability to use LTFL to bring user tagging into the online catalog seemed liked a good compliment to often-antiquated Library of Congress subject headings. Along with recommendations of similar titles we saw LTFL as a way to open up valuable new ways for patrons to find books of interest to them.
Bedford Public Library was the second library in the nation to implement Library Thing for Libraries in May 2007 and it has been great for both patrons and staff.

We evaluated other Library 2.0 tools to see which would be useful in our library. We wanted any Library 2.0 tools to be relevant to not only our users but to staff as well. We didn't want to implement something just for the sake of doing it or something that we could not properly maintain. We launched our blog in October 2007, followed by a MySpace page in December 2007 and then Flickr in February 2008. We considered Instant Messaging for reference questions but have not yet undertaken it since at this time we do not feel we have the staff to maintain it.


We found that implementing these tools made us think about and question some of our practices. We also found that we needed to develop some blog guidelines, adopt a social software policy and inform stakeholders such as the Library Board and city management of these new collaborative tools so that they would be comfortable with their implementation.


We've had positive responses to our blog and Flickr. We post a lot of events on our blog and photos from events on Flickr. We expected a lot more user interaction/comments from these two tools but have actually had very little. We do know that our photos are being looked at and that people are reading our blog posts since the hit counter keeps increasing. We're looking at transitioning over to Facebook since it seems to be more popular these days than MySpace. Overall I think what we have implemented has been very good for our library.