Post #10: LIS 768 Course Reflection

…so that was a semester?!  Wow.  That went by really fast.

For starters, this was my first weekend course–and if I weren’t one wee summer class away from graduating, I reckon I’d be signing up for more of ‘em.  Although I had less face-time with my LIS 768 classmates and professor than I would have had in a conventional course, it feels as though I actually got to know everyone on a much deeper level.  Experimenting with 2.0 tools (Twitter, Facebook, these blogs…) made it easy to overcome the barriers of time and space, keeping us all busily engaged and beautifully networked. 

What I got from this class basically comes down to this: technology is constantly evolving, and so are the people who use it; and for that reason, things work (or don’t work) only as well as the user and the circumstances allow.  It’s all a matter of play and experimentation.  My play taught me that Twitter is fun, but it doesn’t really add anything to my personal life that justifies the time and energy it takes up.  Facebook is another story; I reluctantly created my Facebook account at the beginning of the semester, but the site has won me over.  I like being able to keep in touch with friends, family, and co-workers, and I am really enjoying getting to know the people in my world on a whole different level.  I’ve also been won over by the social networking site, GoodReads–and I love that GoodReads is available as a Facebook application as well.

The other thing that I will carry away from this class is Delicious.  I created a Delicious account a couple of years ago, and it was fun and cool…but I never really found a good use for it in my life.  Using it to tag articles, videos, photos, and websites for my LIS 768 projects and papers was a truly awesome experience that may have changed the whole way I think about research in the future.  It’s great to know that I can access that research from any computer, and assigning keywords to that breadcrumb trail of ideas helped me tremendously in the pre-writing stage.  Delicious also helped me save a lot of trees: I didn’t need to print out as many articles since I had easy, one-click access to the full-text right on my desktop.

Suffice to say that I thoroughly enjoyed this class and I learned a lot during the course of this semester.  I hope that the future will bring me many opportunities to build upon the foundation of this education and put this knowledge into practice.

Post #10: Research Paper Abstract

Grow With the Flow:

Using Web 2.0 Technology to Market Public Libraries to Teens

The young adult demographic is growing faster than that of any other population group, but teenagers have always presented public libraries with a unique challenge.  They are widely regarded as both the most important and difficult demographic to reach.  To compound this dilemma, today’s teens are distinctly unique from children, adults, and every other generation that has preceded them.  The junior high and high schoolers that people the here-and-now landscape represent an inimitable stage of psychological development—but in addition, they constitute the first generation born and raised in a digital world.  As a result, today’s teenaged Digital Natives possess a peerless set of personality traits that includes innate creativity, and a desire for empowerment and participation.  To maintain relevancy in the 21^st century, public libraries are redesigning teen services, programs, collections, and outreach campaigns to account for the unique needs of the up-and-coming generation.

            This, however, is only half the battle.  Having teen-friendly services, programs, and collections is essential, but the work of today’s teen librarians hardly ends there.  While the “if you create a program, they will come” philosophy may magically draw kids and adults to the library, teens remain reluctant and elusive.  Capturing and keeping the attention of young adult users requires public libraries to take a creative, proactive approach to marketing.  To ensure that teens are aware of everything that the library offers, libraries must develop outreach campaigns that invite teen input and participation by harnessing powerful, 2.0 communication tools.  This paper will consider how the teen demographic is revolutionizing the public library, and highlight a variety of practical ways that various 2.0 tools (including: texting, IM/chat, social network sites, blogs/RSS, digital media sharing sites) can be used to facilitate the library’s ability to communicate with young adult users.

Post #9: Group Project Reflection

I think the hardest part of any group project is always the coordination factor: trying to get everybody on the same page, in the same place, at the same time.  This is particularly challenging in grad school, because so many of us are juggling full-time jobs and family responsibilities alongside our continued education.

For this project, I worked with Brett, Jeff N., Ellen, and Laona.  Technology provided my group with an effective means of sidestepping some of these issues.  I’ve known for some time that the Internet is a powerful tool for communication, but the applications we used to put this project together have left me with a new understanding–and a new appreciation–of the depth and breadth of this power.

Email was our default mode of communication: it was the easiest web tool to access, and also the most convenient since we were all accustomed to using it on a daily basis for a multitude of purposes.  Brett, Jeff and I have Gmail accounts–and one of my personal favorite (and truly addictive) features of Gmail is the chat application that enables you to IM other users from your email interface.  Brett and I used the Gmail chat to coordinate our work, exchange links, and broadcast bursts of real-time information that could not wait for a regular email.  Laona and I engaged in a similar chat exchange via Facebook, when she chanced to notice that we were both logged in at the same time.  But while the immediacy and casual ease of chat facilitated my ability to work on this project, it also complicated my non-school-life a little.  The more I think about it, the more I find myself thinking that–when you cut to the chase–the Web 2.0 world is basically just one ginormous mashup of endless stuff.  It’s great to be able to “multitask” by keeping up with friends, coworkers, and classmates via my Facebook profile–but as much as I love my work and my classes, I don’t always want to be thinking about them all the time.  In a way, the best thing and the worst thing about Web 2.0 is one and the same: social technology is the art and science of total convergence.

We also used a wiki to share ideas and resources.  Our pbwiki account enabled us to work collaboratively and remotely at the same time.  Similarly, we used Google Docs to build our presentation.  I had never used Google Docs before, and it was a really nice, easy way to generate slides.  Because our presentation came together so well, we decided to use Google Docs to create our handout–but in the end, this failed quite miserably.  GoogleDocs is great for creating simple, no-frills documents, but our handout required some fancy-schmancy text effects and formatting that exceeded the capabilities of the program.  In the end, I resorted to the old standby of creating the handout in Word and emailing it to my classmates as an attachment.

My contributions to this project were: developing the blog, creating the powerpoint slides for the blog, explaining the role of the blog during the presentation, and creating the handout and takeout box prop.

Post #8: Tracie on Twitter

I’ve had at least a working knowledge of most of the web tools we have discussed in class so far, with one important exception: Twitter.  Twitter has really tweeted up a buzz lately, generating articles a-plenty in both the professional literature and the popular press–but I did  not have an opportunity to try it out until this semester.

In all honesty, I am having a hard time understanding the point of it.  My life isn’t really interesting enough to make me want to share a constant stream of 140-character news bites with the whole world, for one thing.  For another, I’m just not a naturally confident person, so the transparency of my tweets makes me feel very nervous and sort of emotionally naked and vulnerable.  (Note to self:  check the “protect my updates” box as soon as this semester ends…) I’ve also been having a hard time making sense of the incoming tweets that are streamed onto my home page.  Links are pretty straight-forward, but the “@” conversations tend to mystify me.

Nevertheless, there are a few things that Twitter does really well.  As Daniel Terdiman observes in the CNET news blog, Twitter is raising amateur journalism to whole new heights.  At the South by Southwest Interactive musical festival in Austin, Texas, twittering enabled fest attendees (and wannabe attendees from far and away) to keep tabs on the “collective agenda” of everything from stage acts to free ice cream.  A similar phenomena has infiltrated sports tournaments , book awards, and politics.  As a result of all this tweeting, the communication gap between the citizens and the movers-and-shakers of society has diminished.

The truth is, even great technology is not neccessarily “great” for every user and every context.  Twitter may not be the most practical 2.0 tool for me on a personal level, but it has a lot of potential for the library profession.  One of the things that I do love about Twitter is its adaptability: I like being able to send a tweet via SMS, the web, or an IM service; I like being able to link the Twitter application to other social networking tools (such as FaceBook); and I like being able to  follow others’ tweets via a customized feed reader.  As many libraries are learning, Twitter is a practical and useful way to communicate breaking news–such as emergency closings and program updates–to patrons.  It may not be my favorite web tool, and it certainly isn’t perfect…but is anything?

Brand Monitoring Project: AHML

I have been monitoring my local public library, the Arlington Heights Memorial Library.  To execute this project, I kept tabs on the Library via Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, and Yelp.

  Continue reading »

Post #7: Reflection on 2.0 tools and YA marketing

The big lesson I am learning in this class is pretty simple: networking is everything.  2.0 technology facilitates communication and collaboration, and libraries need to learn how to talk that talk and walk that walk.  From where I’m standing, better communication and increased transparency are the biggest opportunities that the new technology offers the library profession—and putting these tools to work seems to be particularly critical in reaching the teen demographic. Continue reading »

Post #6, Lit Review: Using Technology to Market the Library to Teens

Libraries are doing awesome and innovative things to amp up service to young adults, but this is only half the battle.  Creating and planning cutting-edge programs for teens is a critical first step to ensuring that the library remains relevant to its users—but spreading the word about what the library is doing is even more important (and challenging!).  Web 2.0 technology provides libraries with imperative opportunities to bridge this communication gap.  In my paper, I will explore how this technology can be incorporated into campaigns that market library programs and services to young adults. Continue reading »

Post #5: The Tracie Network!

As EduCause observes, “Creating or refining one’s self-identity and values is an important part of college. College students are encouraged to discover who

they are and how they relate to others.” This is nothing new; but what is new is the technology that expedites and facilitates this journey from adolescence to adulthood.  Like many of today’s young people, I came of age online; I was in college when many of the Web 2.0 tools started taking off, and I have steadily engaged in a variety of online networks ever since.  The thread that binds these experiences together seems to be a search for identity: social networks enabled me to explore and develop my sense of self with a fearless freedom that did not exist for me in the real world.  Continue reading »

Tracie plays with YouTube!

…remind me to actually watch these sometime with the sound enabled…

I am a Read poster!