Category: Web 2.0

del.icio.us is social bookmarking done right. I remember when online bookmark services first started appearing, solving the problem of people bookmarking a site on their home computer that they may need the next day on their work computer. I tried them out and found some of them to be fairly useful – then came del.icio.us. Not only does del.icio.us allow you to save URLs for later use, it also allows you to find URLs that others have found useful, suggest URLs for others and pick up feeds of either specific people, specific topics or general “top picks”. This is what makes it social.
The San Mateo Library’s del.ico.us account is a perfect example of an organization using the del.icio.us tools to create a very useful resource. They organize their saved URLs into the Dewey Decimal System (most of them, at least) with a few un-Dewey’d links tagged as “ready reference” or “book” or other not-quite-easily-stuffed-into-Dewey labels. That is one way to use the structure that del.icio.us provides.
Another way is to create useful links for patrons, like we have at MRRL’s account and make them available on our site as “reference links”. All of our links are ready reference-type links! I used a javascript library called “Dishy” to make pulling our links from del.icio.us easy on our Reference Links page. Because of the API (Application Programming Interface) that del.icio.us (and many other Web 2.0 tools) provides, creating new uses for your data becomes fairly easy. Dishy proved to be pretty much cut-and-paste functionality, allowing me to concentrate on the looks of the page, rather than the way it works – but if you really want to spend some time getting into the API, you can roll your own program that does exactly what you want. There are other ways to access your data through del.icio.us, though, including RSS, JSON and plain old HTML.
Once you put your data into del.icio.us (easy enough with the browser buttons they offer for both IE and Firefox), the options you have to reuse it are pretty much limitless!
Why?
I’ve covered the what people do with del.icio.us and pointed you to some resources for how, so now we’ll get a little deeper into “why”. Like most Web 2.0 tools, del.icio.us gives you the opportunity to save your data and then reuse it multiple ways. The API I mentioned above gives you control over your data – you put it in once and then use it in multiple ways (reference links, RSS feed of the latest “finds” from your library, in a Google Maps mashup with geographically important links, etc., etc., etc.) in multiple formats. It’s not only a great way to keep yourself organized at multiple computers, it’s also a great way to share the collective wisdom of your library and librarians with your patrons – it’s one more service you can offer your patrons to improve the quality of information they find on the Internet.

Anyone who has read my blog for any length of time knows I’m a total Twitter fangirl. I use it, and love it, daily. I evangelize about it! But, when I tell people how wonderful it is to have the collective mind floating through my Firefox sidebar each day, do I really do the possible useful applications of Twitter for libraries justice? Probably not, so here goes!
First, there are a lot of great posts out there about how to use Twitter in libraries. The last one (linked to the word “libraries”) even has a great explanation of what Twitter is. This is a great starting point to learn how other people use Twitter.
One great use of Twitter by a library is at LPI Library. They use it both for announcements of new books and programs, but also to contribute to the conversations that go on among the librarians using Twitter. The library ( for The Lunar and Planetary Institute) provides a lot of great information on topics within it’s specialty – it’s a handy Twitterer to follow whether you are interested in library topics or astronomical topics.
The way we (as in MRRL) use Twitter is as an announcement broadcaster that has the ability to broadcast our news to people’s cell phones, IM clients, web browsers and email clients – whichever they prefer. The way I (as in Webgoddess) use Twitter is as a water-cooler. I spend more time responding to other people in a conversational way as I do announcing what it is I’m doing. I spend as much time asking questions of the “hive mind” as I do announcing what it is I’m doing. Yes, I use it to keep my co-workers and friends apprised of what it is I’m doing with my day, but I like the social, not-quite-gossipy, but definitely chatty aspect of Twitter just as much as I do the work-related announcements of what I’m up to.
One very recent use of twitter (I blogged about it the other day) is to provide reference services via the Twitter architecture. The original idea is as a decentralized, 24/7 reference service, but it could be personalized for use in a busy library with a heavy population of cell phone users as well. Perhaps not as 24/7 service, but definitely during busy reference hours. The ability to text in reference questions is something that some libraries (Yale, for example) is doing already. Twitter would let smaller libraries offer this service without investing in the underlying architecture to handle the text messages – Twitter does that for them.
These are some of the uses that I find Twitter ideally suited for. What does your library do with Twitter? Is anyone using RSS from the catalog to populate a Twitter feed? How do you use Twitter?