Maybe there's something there to inspire us?

Anderson PF. 31 Flavors - Things to Do With Flickr in Libraries. Web Junction, August 1 2007. http://webjunction.org/do/DisplayContent;jsessionid=6271E4E033F462C82F258C17BCD5AE4D?id=17624.

Here is brief overview of the 31 things. Details and descriptions in the article. Enjoy!

1. Reference
2. Pics of pages for patrons
3. Library photo-tours
4. Wayfinding tools
5. Embed slideshows in web pages
6. Friends Flickr group
7. Pics of campus and community events
8. Find pics and groups for your community
9. Make new Flickr groups for topics of interest to your community
10. Patrons tag your Flickr pics
11. Pic a tag for public pics of your library, make rss feed
12. Screenshots for online tutorials
13. Collect and share teaching slides
14. Online exhibits
15. Promote special collections highlights
16. What's on New Books
17. Post public domain images from e-collections, link back to source
18. Flickr widget for library homepage
19. Partner with museums or historical society
20. Partner with other libraries and educators
21. Communicate with book-repair staff
22. Communicate facilities issues
23. Capture brainstorming from staff meetings
24. Pics from staff parties
25. Staff photos
26. Screenshots for tech troubleshooting
27. Pics of best practices
28. Pics of poster sessions from conferences
29. Favorites useful pics by others
30. Get ideas for renovations
31. Join Flickr library groups

These are:

A standard search.

http://apps.facebook.com/mlibrary/

Presently this is a UIUC clone. We're looking into upgrading this to the functionality of the next item on this list, and maybe at some point I'll throw more experimental ideas into the next item.

Update: 8/13/2007
The standard search has been updated to be mostly the same as the beta search. Those of you with the standard search already installed, will find the box in your profile to exhibit the new functionality.

A beta search.

http://apps.facebook.com/mlibrary_search/

This has most of the features I could think to add, and it's entirely integrated in Facebook.

A preview of what to expect:

Search results stay in the Facebook canvas page for the appliation.

You can share the results with friends on facebook, or post them to your profile.

You can click a link to add the book to your mirlyn "My Shelf"

You get stable links to the document in the search results.

Locations are clickable, though they don't take you to the specific library's website at this time, they do search the library pages to find that library.

Some call numbers are clickable. Specifically, if the book is located in the graduate library, clicking on the call number will take you to a map of the the floor you can expect to find the book.

If the book has been digitized by mdp, then a link to its google books page will be provided.

An hours page.

http://apps.facebook.com/mlibrary_hours/

It puts today's hours for your favorite library on your Facebook profile. Nothing too fancy.

Dentistry Library: Virtual Exhibit: http://mblog.lib.umich.edu/dentlib/archives/2007/07/virtual_exhibit.html

Now, if only the plug-in was already installed on the staff computers ...

So let's say you combine the two types of functionality for marketing. Create an account in Twitter for the library. Create a matching account in Jaiku. Have a Flickr account. Then create a Twitter / Jaiku stream to promote new books or items from special collections or such. For example, you could say everyday at 10am there will be a tweat/jaik about some cool thing on the New Books shelf. Have a picture of the cover image or title page or something visually interesting. Put the pic in Flickr, and include a tinyurl link to the Flickr pic in a tweat about the book, with a quote, title or link to the record (PURL) in Mirlyn or LibraryThing. Then do the same sort of thing at 2pm highlighting things from our special collections.

Bet any booklovers would subscribe to the feed? I sure would!

There are other neat things going on with Twitter for libraries. TwitterProse highlights a book a day, with brief quote. So does TwitterLit. BookTwo is "reading" James Joyce to the twittersphere. Maybe there are other mashups that would combine the Twitter functionality with some other source of information to create interesting ways to project information soundbites. Here is a list of Twitter mashups. Any other ideas?

Frantic Industries: All Twitter tools and mashups in one place: http://franticindustries.com/blog/2007/04/04/all-twitter-tools-and-mashups-in-one-place/

My six-person book club just started a wiki to help us keep track of what we've read, schedule dates for future meetings, suggest what to read next, and share links to all the articles, websites, and YouTube videos that come up during our discussions. It is turning out to be a perfect tool for the kind of sharing and planning we want to do, and everyone really likes it, even the non-techies and non-librarians. It has gotten me thinking about the capabilities of wikis beyond the wisdom-of-crowds, millions-of-anonymous-Wikepedia-editors framework.

Thoughts?

Check out our own Dentistry Library to see what Patricia has done on Flickr

You could also just have a link to your del.icio.us page, like the Lansing, Illinois Public Library has.

These links can then be syndicated so that users could then subscribe to an RSS feed and see when new links have been added. The idea of creating tags in del.icio.us also would help to organize the links and help people find links of interest. You could accept suggestions for links from other del.icio.us users.

The coursepack for the class was divided into broad subject categories so I started with those, added a few more and went subject searching in Mirlyn. I imported citations from Mirlyn into Refworks to get the bibliographic format I wanted, created a bibliography then cut and pasted the citations into the appropriate category on the wiki. Linking to the Mirlyn record is problematic. The links you get when you look up the video are based on your session and won't work later so you have to go through a few hoops to cut and paste the URL for the video.

I'm trying to get Women's Studies faculty and students interested in becoming wiki members so they can add and edit the list, too. I think anyone can add a comment now, if they have a WetPaint account. I thought I had a PhD student ready to join but so far no luck but I'm workin' on it!

Any ideas for making this process easier?

We could have cut and paste sections of tutorials for people to use and certain people could "be assigned" certain tutorials or sections so that the wiki would act as an up to date repository where instructors could pluck what they need when their getting ready to do a class. It's such a pain to keep handouts, web pages, etc. up to date when these databases update their interface or add features all the time.

I would like to explore ways of getting library content into Facebook. Whether this be something akin to UIUC's new catalog search or something like LibGuides, I'm not sure -- but I'd like to sit down and toss around some ideas and get a feel for what's feasible.

Here’s my quick take on Springshare's LibGuides, which may help get some discussion going.

There are really two pieces of LibGuides:

1. LibGuides itself, a tool for libraries and librarians to organize, format, and present content in guides hosted on Springshare’s servers; and

2. The Facebook application, through which students and others can find, search, and interact with guides created by their school’s librarians directly from within Facebook.

At this point, most of the LibGuide content is in a demo library called Springshare Library. You can access this on the Web at http://demo.libguides.com/ or via Facebook. (Add the LibGuides application in Facebook, then select Springshare Library as your library.)

There are demo guides there, of various types and in various stages of completion, put together by Springshare staff and by people, like me, who have signed up for demo accounts. The idea, as I understand it, is that libraries that subscribe will have their own LibGuide libraries, with their own banners, branding, and formatting. They will also have direct searching of their own catalogs, from their LibGuide Web pages and from within Facebook. (The Springshare demo searches the New York Public Library catalog.)

There’s a lot to discuss, starting with the functionality of the LibGuide tool itself, which has a lot of features and which I’ve found flexible and easy to use. You can request a trial account from the LibGuides Web page (http://www.springshare.com/libguides/index.html) and start to use it. (If I remember right, trial accounts can create up to two guides that go into the demo library.)

Then there’s the Facebook application, which is a little harder to evaluate at this point, but which offers the promise of bringing the content more directly to students. There is plenty to discuss about that, too.

There are other things, too, like pricing -- the tentative price I've heard seemed fairly reasonable -- integration with library systems and infrastructure, and more. But I hope this can get people looking and get the conversation going.