Time does fly. It doesn’t seem that long ago that I was contacted about doing a workshop for the Metropolitan Library System based on the presentation I gave at Computers in Libraries, but that was back in June. The workshop is in November, and I just made my flight and hotel arrangements.
More information (including how to register) about the workshop can be found here.
I was contacted by someone from the Metropolitan Library System who saw my presentation at Computers in Libraries and asked if I would turn my presentation into a half-day workshop for them. Don’t have any details yet, but it will probably be sometime in the fall.
A few people I know have been taking a close look at how they’re using social networking. I believe the conversation began in person at Computers in Libraries but has continued online (of course). The conversation kicked off with Greg Schwartz’s post, but I’ve come across a few other librarians who have picked up on this thread, including, among others, Meredith at Information Wants to Be Free and Andrea at Library Techtonics, who has had a few good posts recently about how she uses social media.
One of the reasons this conversations has cropped up at this point in time is that many of these so-called social networking tools (like many, I dislike this term, but don’t know what else to call them) have matured and become stable, well, Twitter has at least matured. Although new applications are still coming out and people are experimenting and adopting new tools, it seems that there are several that have become standards that will not be easily replaced, partly because people have been investing in them for many years. I have so many photos in flickr, for example, that moving to another platform would be highly inconvenient.
This conversation has come up at a good time for me because I had been thinking a lot about how I use these tools. I try things, adopt things, ignore things without much of a plan. I have accounts all over the place and use only a handful. Since quite a few people have been talking about the way they use their social networks, it seems like a good time to step aside and think about how I’ve been using mine.
One thing is for sure: my use of these tools is directly related to my being a librarian. I can’t imagine that I would be so involved in social networking left to my own devices, as it were. I would venture to guess that at least 90% of the people I am in contact with via these tools are librarians. Very few of my “real world” friends participate. The fact that so many of my online friends are librarians is, in part, a self-fulfilling prophecy. I am more likely to add someone I don’t know as a “friend” if I see that he or she is a librarian. Other random people are often denied.
I am not going to attempt to tackle an analysis of all the tools I use in one post but hope to do so over several posts.