Friday, March 20th, 2009...10:15 am
Post Number Eight – Brand Monitoring
I think I need to begin discussing this assignment by telling you about all my failures. I was hoping to find some juicy scandal, raging controversy or some such conversation to follow on either twitter, flickr, facebook, a blog or in a forum. I started following a few different libraries on twitter and flickr. Then that article hit the wires about the gaming taking place at the Nebraska Library Commission and I thought jackpot! So I started following them on twitter, but all they do on their twitter page is repost the reference questions they receive. I guess that’s a good idea. I assume the logic behind that process is posting research questions lets people outside the library know that the library can answer questions about all kinds of topics…but I found the feed to be rather annoying, so I stopped following. I also thought some of the questions were probably of a very personal nature to the person asking, and while they of course do not post people’s names, I still found myself wondering if the couple that asked about how they might go about finding the child they gave up for adoption would really appreciate that question appearing on twitter. But that’s actually a different topic and something that I am not interested in addressing for this assignment. I also tried to follow the gaming story on various blogs, but that conversation peetered out almost as soon as it began.
ANYWAY.
One of the other libraries that I started following on Twitter was the NYPL. Their feed was more or less about events taking place at the library or interesting mentions of the library in the press. If I lived in NY I would probably continue to follow them on twitter because that’s an easy way to keep track of events. But, I find twitter to be a difficult place to follow conversations that you aren’t directly involved in so I decided that I might have better luck reading a blog.
Through NYPL’s twittering I found this site: http://labs.nypl.org/about/ and I have to say, it’s a pretty amazing thing.
The blog is called the New York Public Library Labs and its purpose is SO WEB 2.0 and LIBRARY 2.0 that I almost cried when I found it. Don’t believe me? Here’s a description of their purpose from their website:
Purpose/Goal of this Blog
NYPL Labs provides a window into the overall digital experience of The New York Public Library. Our goal is to not just invent the digital future of the NYPL, but to blog it along the way. This site will document, comment on, and reveal our practices and processes as we start experimenting with new applications and interfaces.
A few weeks ago they posted a “Usability Survey” that you can look at right here: http://usability.nypl.org/ and since then I have been watching the comments and conversation about it. The survey itself is really easy to follow and take and generated a lot of comments itself. It was interesting to see that people were so involved.
A follow-up post about the survey was posted a few weeks later. There were fewer comments left by users, but the post discussed the number of respondents and talked about the information that was culled.
I have to say, I am not really a technospeak person, but I think the blog is completely fascinating and I will definitely keep reading it. It’s like watching a digital library evolve in real time.
I googled the blog name to see if other librarians were talking about it on their blogs and guess what? They are! Here are some of the posts/comments I found:
The Centered Librarian mentioned the blog and says that it’s worth a look.
DigitalKoans mentioned the usability survey on their blog
UsersLib mentions how great the new NYPL mobile app is, which the NYPL Labs blog introduced
Librarian.net also recommends the blog
It’s also mentioned positively here:
So, if you have a chance, please, please, please check them out. A behind the scenes look at the next library frontier!
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