Web 2.0 Best Practices: When Author Events Lead to Library Collections

 

SOPACs—Social Online Public Access Catalogs—are expanding so quickly that yesterday’s dream (or nightmare, depending on your point of view) is on the verge of becoming today’s routine.

Take, for instance, the interactions between library staff, library users, library catalogs, and libraries themselves in one small way: through a library-sponsored author event. One year ago, before John Blyberg unveiled what he dubbed a SOPAC at Ann Arbor District Library and then moved over to Darien (Connecticut) Library, the library user might have learned of the event through a flyer, a library newsletter, a listing in a local newspaper, word of mouth, or by searching an online calendar of events provided by a library. The interactivity of SOPACs like the one currently in use at Nashville Public Library is inspiring additional connections between library users, OPACs, and websites.

Visitors to the Library’s website are able to see a brief and visually attractive listing of a few featured events. If they choose the link for a specific author event, they jump to a description of the event, can click on a link to have an email reminder sent to them shortly before the event takes place, and can use additional links to find other “Books & Writers” events which include access to the Library’s collections (note added 11/30/07: library catalog link is to the left of the events column). Trying the initial “Books and Writers” link myself, I discovered that a documentary film about Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Halberstam and the writing of his final book will be held at the Library on December 11—news compelling enough to make me wish I could be in Nashville that evening.

The same Library home page can help readers make even more direct connections to the online catalog: following a link from a brief news item about novelist Ann Patchett receiving the 2007 Nashville Public Library Literary Award leads to a detailed press release which allows readers to check on the availability, through Nashville’s online catalog, of any of her works which are owned by the Library.

Nashville Public Library Public Relations staff was the driving force behind this innovation, according to Library Automation Specialist Jamen McGranahan. Library staff worked together to develop the links between the pages and Nashville’s WebPAC. The winners, of course, are the Library’s users—and any others who decide to implement their own versions of what Nashville has accomplished.

This item was originally posted on November 20,  2007 on Infoblog at http://infoblog.infopeople.org.

Michael Wesch, YouTube, and a Vision of Students Today

 

Less than a year ago, most of us would have asked “Michael who?” if someone mentioned Michael Wesch. That was before the Kansas State University Anthropology professor posted a short video, “The Machine Is Us/ing Us,” on YouTube in January 2007 and became one of 22 winners of the 2007 Wired magazine Rave Award a few months later for his exploration of how Web 2.0 is changing the way we see the world of information and ourselves.

The number of people who have watched the video has increased exponentially. It has now been viewed 3,610,519 times, so Wesch’s posting of two new pieces within the last week—including one on how students view the learning process, “A Vision of Students Today”—has already attracted over 140,000 viewers. More importantly, Wesch and his students in his Digital Ethnography project, are making us sit up and pay attention not only to what is happening in contemporary classrooms, but how students are discussing it: with an enchanting and poignant burst of creativity.

His work is a great example of everything that is right about Web 2.0: the use of shareware to quickly produce thought-provoking pieces which challenge us to reconsider much of what we know; the open sharing of what he and his students are producing; and an invitation to join them as they build a new community through the Digital Ethnography Working Group and its blog.

An interview with blogger John Battelle offers insight into how Wesch works and reveals that, for “The Machine is Us/ing Us,” it took “about 3 days to put the video together, but of course it took months of thinking and research.” The Digital Ethnography site at Kansas State University includes items such as his posting on October 18, 2007—a discussion of the immediate reaction to “A Vision of Students Today” and an accompanying piece on how we obtain and process information, “Information R/evolution.”

Then there is the work itself. It’s edgy. Emotional. Controversial. Captivating. And it inspires reactions, as evidenced by the more than 200 responses on the YouTube site and the growing number of posts on Digital Ethnography. Wesch, on that site, claims it “is currently the most blogged about video in the blogosphere,” and it’s not hard to see why. The students featured in the video tell us what—and how much—they read (books vs. websites), write (term papers vs. emails), and listen to; how much time they study every day; and how many hours they need per day to accomplish all they set out to do.

“Vision” is about far more than one group’s experiences in school: it makes all of us who are involved in training think about what we accomplish, how we accomplish it, and what we might be doing differently in a world where the time it takes for lessons learned to become obsolete diminishes year by year. (One student suggests that by the time she graduates, she will be accepting a job which doesn’t even exist at the time she is earning her degree.)

The good news for trainers and other educators is that there isn’t going to be a lack of work for us anytime soon. The even better news for those of who like to learn is that there’s no end in sight for that part of the process, either—particularly when we have people like Michael Wesch and his students around to teach us.

This item was originally posted on October 22, 2007 on Infoblog at http://infoblog.infopeople.org.