For Michael Stephen’s current course blog for the class, each student has their own blog, similar to mine, where we post our own assignments that are located on the course blog along with syllabus information, readings, videos, and blog communication.  We were given instruction on how to use an RSS feed to see updates on the course blog and on our peers’ new posts on their individual course blogs. The only difficulty I have with this is that I rarely remember to check my RSS feed and I don’t currently know if there is a way to send update notifications as an email message, but I check the syllabus blog every week because of assignments. I understand that I am in a social networking class, and it is natural for us to learn how to make a blog, but I also think it is good for all students to develop blogging skills and think about creating content that is professional and able to be searched on the internet. More and more leadership positions are asking for examples of web identities or content to supplement resumes. Students can keep the blog going if they choose and use it as a professional extension of their portfolio.

Here is an example I found of how Ning can be used to conduct a class social network (there are many more, search for “course” or “class” on the Ning search page):

Kienzle’s English course

You can’t explore the features here without becoming a member of the group, but you can see how he organizes course content on his main page. The Ning format can be moved around to fit your needs, and you can add as many or as little features as you’d like. It can get junked up pretty quickly if you add everything, though. Here is a site that has most of the available options, to get a better idea of how things can be adjusted:

Library 2.0

My suggestion would be to set up a new account and play with the features and set up, or join a group to explore when you’re ready. Its free, no strings attached.

Looking at the English course Ning site example, you could have a listing of assignments or full syllabus on this page, or have a document of the syllabus like he does, or you could even provide a link to your syllabus blog in the style of Micheal Stephen’s for our Library 2.0 class if you want to keep them clean and separate. From here, you can have your students add their own profiles and post their assignments in forums, share ideas with blogging, and they receive email notifications when new content is added. You can post events, too, and add a function that shows your delicious updates if you choose to get a delicious account for your class up and going. To keep the assignments manageable on this kind of setup, I think making a forum for each assignment then having your students post responses there will keep the grading easier so you don’t have a pool of constant blogging that you have to sort out. What’s great about Ning is that every student can participate with each other and you, so there is very open communication. You can always have papers sent to your email for privacy on some assignments if you’d like. A possible downside is that they won’t have a personal blog to add to their portfolio after this class, but they can definitely add social networking skills to their professional bag.

My group and I created the Ning social networking site More Than Books: Midwest Library Connection, a place to invite others to upcoming events in Midwest libraries and to share experiences and ideas on developing library activities.  Click here to see how things are developing.

After observing how the site is being used by its current members in these early stages, I would like to propose some changes to features and to the focus of the network to better meet the needs of the users.  Some areas are used more than others, and we need to focus on the strengths, and either improve or eliminate the weaknesses.

The feature on our site that seems to be attracting the most activity is the upcoming events.  This was the original basis for creating this site, so this is good.  We want people to regularly check back in to view what’s new, so it is important that this list is constantly changing. As founding members, we should continue to share events as often as possible to increase user visits to our site.

The weak spots seem to be groups and the forums. These are mostly started by the founding members then left to sit with little or no activity.  There are helpful links and great starts to sharing stories within some of the groups.  The problem is, a member has to enter the group forum to see the discussion.  Many members will sign on, it will look as if nothing has changed, then sign off.

To support the function of our site acting as an event bulletin for Midwest Libraries, I believe we should provide a front page with as much changing content as possible.  It is alluring to provide as many options as we can to target the needs of our members, but sometimes less is more.  It seems that users will mostly be visiting this community to socialize, casually share experiences, and hear about upcoming events.  I do not think our users will be using this site, at least early on, for creating much rich content of their own.  Most people will be coming to our page to check what’s new, maybe share an event of their own or share a photo, then sign off.  We want to provide them with as much new information right on the front page as possible.  If we create a format that will encourage members who are currently participating in groups and forums to post in a highly visible spot on the site, more people will read the new content, see that the page is constantly changing, and be inclined to visit more often.  This may even inspire others to create new content on their own.

To strengthen our current site, I propose to eliminate the groups feature and either remove or restrict the focus of forums, encouraging the authors to move their stories and research to a blog that will have high visibility in a blog on our main page.  This information will be discovered by more readers, hopefully leading to new members and satisfying the current users of the site.  We could use the forums in a more focused way, providing a place for questions or discussion on a select few broad topics that center specifically around activities in a Library setting.  By decreasing the amount real estate we have for writing new content, we will concentrate the new posts to provide a richer resource and increase content visibility.  I think we have a good start, and we just have to respond to how users are utilizing the site to make the community stronger.

As far as group communication went, we started on Twitter, but none of us were getting updates and some weren’t logging in until for long periods of time.  We moved to communicating through the Ning site and directly emailing each other.  I tend to use Twitter for communication with those people that I know are highly connected through this site.  I can Twitter my friend Rhea and know she will see my tweet through her iphone.  It is at times easier to communicate with her on Twitter than texting her, especially on my ancient phone.  I might use Twitter in future groups, but it did not seem to work in this case.

My contribution to the group consisted of brainstorming the initial project, creating the Ning community, designing the site layout, and installing navigational instructions to help integrate users into the site.  I consult with the group to discuss potential improvements to the site and implement the desired changes.  I added some foundation content, like groups, blogs, and photos, and added new friends as people joined the site.  I will continue to provide support to users with questions or comments, and make necessary changes to the site as the community evolves.

My social network is called “Friends In Film: A meeting place for moving image archivists,” and is currently under construction.  I am attempting to lay the groundwork for a site that is welcoming, flexible, and encourages people to add content and share the site with others to create a resource that is constantly growing and changing and is valuable to its developers and readers.  My welcome to the site reads:

Welcome to Friends In Film: A meeting place for moving image archivists!

Join us to share and discuss issues and events relating to the field of moving image archives. All are welcome! Join groups, add to forum discussions, and invite friends to events in your area. Post blogs on a wide range of topics within the field. Tell us about your latest research, document exciting events, or share innovation whenever you see it. We would love to hear about anything archives. Get creative and utilize this site to its full potential to create a resource that harnesses the intelligence of the group to further advance the field of moving image archives. First stop, tell us about yourself in the Forum “Introduce Yourself” so we all can say hello. Develop your profile, add pics and RSS feeds from your favorite sites, and add or invite friends. Hit me up any time with questions, comments, or concerns. Thanks for joining the Friends In Film community!

Enjoy!

Danielle N. Kramer
Friends In Film
Creator

I hope that this introduction will draw in new members and encourage them to start participation right away.  The introduction of Ning social network Library 2.0 begins with a request for members to introduce themselves, which seems like it has been a successful way to integrate newcomers into their community.  By asking members to introduce themselves in a forum, I hope that they will receive a welcome from current members who will give new members confidence and encouragement to explore further.

The main purpose of this site is to bring together all contributors in the field together on a shared platform that allows concentrated discussion on topics that are in development.  When I attended the conference of the Association of Moving Image Archives last year, I witnessed that archives across the nation were dealing with very similar issues, and often times there were many different solutions.  It is not every day that so many archivists can get together in one place to throw all ideas together to build a common solution.  For many, it happens only once a year at the AMIA conference.  By providing forums to hash out the challenges like facing developments in educational programs, or creating a standard metadata schema for film collections, as many members who have opinions on the subject from their unique experiences can add to the discussion year round.

What draws me to Ning versus networking sites like Facebook and Myspace is that the mission and the conversations can’t get lost among the noise.  At any time, forum discussions, blogs, and groups will be archived, tagged for easy recovery and available for future research in a space dedicated entirely to the subject.  The fact that any member can blog allows for the culmination of rich and unique information that will make this site a value to the field.

This leads to the secondary purpose of the site.  I see this site being an accessible resource, opening a window to the field to encourage and educate curious new members who may develop into archivists one day.  The training and education is developing from apprentice-style experience into a professionalized field taught through higher education.  Due to this transition, it is sometimes difficult to find the best advice on how to break into the field.  I hope that newcomers can find their answers at Friends In Film, and that excited new talent and those wise in the ways of film archiving can find each other, both liable to prosper from finding the right fit.

Like I said, the site is in development.  I am adding some content as a foundation for beginning discussion, and designer Rhea H. Butcher is working on creating logos and a unique look for the site.  I will keep you posted on the development, and invite you all to join when the network is launched.  I would love to hear your thoughts on the project.  All comments are welcome.

It was easy finding the virtual talk around the web about Brooklyn Museum and their innovative social networking membership 1stfans. There is rich conversation to, from, and about Brooklyn Museum’s membership program on platforms all over the Internet. Mostly because they started it. Through developing a presence on Twitter and Facebook, posting content to sites like Flickr and Youtube, and creating the 1stfans blog and vodcast, they have started up a conversation with their community that has sprawled out into an ongoing web of discussion, creation, and feedback. Follow the links below to see how conversations have blossomed into interweaving, inspirational inter-connectivity.

A search for “1stfans” on Twitter brings up a mesh of museum-goer, museum-generated, and featured artists’ creative content, opinions, and conversations. Among the first of my discoveries was the web around 1stfans featured artist of the month of January 2009, An Xiao.  You can follow an interview by critic Hrag Vartanian with artist An Xiao, see links to reactionary photographs on flickr by Random Thoughts, a viewer who experienced the exhibit, read feedback from the interviewer Hrag to to Random Thoughts for their participation, see artist An Xiao thanking blogger
“! info:bubble. heavybubble makes me happy!” for writing about her work on his blog, where he posted the vodcast by Brooklyn Museum that was created by them and posted on their blog and on Youtube, where director Andrea Blythe gave the artist a complimentary comment.  Wow.  That was just some of the buzz around one artist.

Other exchanges are made over the 1stfans artist talk with Matt Held this month for Target First Saturdays , a free event hosted by the museum every first Saturday of the month, open to the entire community.  Great emphasis is made to connect the virtual social networking world of 1stfans with monthly face-to-face events where online friends can meet in person and stay connected on the web until the next event.  Friendships are made, bonds are strengthened, and people become more devoted to attending Brooklyn Museum events to engage with their community.  Fans thank Matt for his talk and the artist thanks them back.  One 1stfan member, azita99,  is bummed that she missed out on her first 1stfan meet, and posts a link to a 1stfan blog writeup from the event that made her long that she could attend even more.  She wasn’t even there and she is still sharing about it.  That’s the power of networking.

Searching the site for “1stfans” brings up tagged photographs of museum events taken by the museum and participants tagging their own photos.  Brooklyn Museum documents a tour of Matt Held’s studio posted to hype up his arrival.  Other photographs advertises a printing event that invited visitors to bring in found paper for Swoon Studio to screen print on for free, along with tons of pics from the event taken by happy campers holding up their souvenirs.  There were photos of the work and program by the Conservation Department on Animal Mummy Research taken by all, and other photos capturing experiences on a puruse through the rest of the museum.  The brand name 1stfans is easy to tag and share captured moments with others searching for content and conversation around the museum events.

The Brooklyn Museum photostream documents installations, events, interviews, studio visits, and gives expanations in captions about the event with tags for searching.  Viewers give feedback to the museum directly through comments on the photographs.

A search for “1stfans” on Technorati holds news and reviews around 1stfan membership and activities.  There are blogs advertising upcoming events, documenting those past, and sharing the successes and sometimes criticism of the program.   Some use 1stfans as a model of how social networking tools can help connect other museums with their communities.

Reviews of 1stfans:

Brooklyn Museum Adds the “Social” to Their “Social Media” Campaigns at Great Dance,  Art Charities Turn to Online Techniques at Charity Navigator Blog, and Art on Twitter: Yes, but is it Twart at guardian.co.uk review 1stfans activities, some relating it to other social networking experiences.

Blogs on the An Xiao experience:

Artist An Xiao on Twitter as a Medium at http://maryanndevine.typepad.com, My Interview with An Xiao This Wednesday and Two Tweeters & a Tweety Bird: @thatwaszen & @hrag’s Chat by Hrag Vartanian

Blogs on Matt Held:

1stfans Meetup For March 2009: Artist Matt Held by Brooklyn Museum

Kudos, Brooklyn Museum, on your 1stfans membership program and your successes in reaching out to your community in open, two-way conversation.  I expect to see more museums, schools and libraries follow this model of utilizing social networking tools to bring people from remote locations into the institutions that have showed their appreciation by listening, acting, and openly sharing with their supporters.

Logo citations:

1stfans logo, http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/join/.

Twitter logo, http://twitter.com/home.

Flickr logo, http://www.flickr.com/.

Technorati logo, http://vectorlogo.blogspot.com/2007_11_01_archive.html.

Brooklyn Museum. “Introducing 1stfans: A Socially Networked Museum Membership.” Brooklyn Museum Blog, Dec. 5, 2008, http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/community/blogosphere/bloggers/2008/12/05/introducing-1stfans-a-socially-networked-museum-membership/.

Dempsey, Lorcan. “Always on: Libraries in a world of permanent connectivity.” First Monday. no. 1 (Jan. 5, 2009), http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2291.

Frost, Dan. “Killer Statue – Psyched About the Site!” New York Times, Mar. 12, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/12/arts/artsspecial/12social.html.

Kaufman, Peter B. “Video, education, and open content: Notes toward a new research and action agenda. First Monday. v. 12, no. 4 (Apr. 2, 2007), http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1767/1647.

Kennedy, Randy. “To Ramp Up Its Web Site, MoMA Loosens Up.” New York Times, Mar. 4, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/05/arts/design/05moma.html.

Kirchberg, Volker. “Thinking about “Scenes: A New View of Vistiors’ Influence on Museums.” Curator. (2007): p. 239-54.

Madsen-Brooks, Leslie. “Percolations: Museums and Social Networking Sites, Part IV.” Museum Blogging, July 8, 2007, http://museumblogging.com/2007/07/08/percolations-museums-and-social-networking-sites-part-iv/.

Simon, Nina. “What is Twitter, Really? And Can it Do Anything for Museums?” Museum 2.0, Apr. 16, 2007, http://museumtwo.blogspot.com/2007/04/what-is-twitter-really-and-can-it-do.html.

Simon, Nina. “1stfans: An Audience-Specific Membership Program at the Brooklyn Museum.” Museum 2.0, Feb. 12, 2009, http://museumtwo.blogspot.com/2009/02/1stfans-audience-specific-membership.html.

Simon, Nina. “Change from the Inside: A Conversation with COSI.” Museum 2.0, Feb. 5, 2009, http://museumtwo.blogspot.com/2009/02/change-from-inside-conversation-with.html.

Thompson, Clive. “Clive Thompson on How Twitter Creates a Social Sixth Sense.” Wired Magazine Issue 15.07, June 26, 2007, http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/magazine/15-07/st_thompson.

Immediately, I noticed a feature on the Library 2.0 site that I would like to add to our site, More Than Books. On the main page, there is a welcome message that stays at the top of the page, giving an overview of how to use the site. This will be very helpful in a site that is open to the public to make people feel welcome and incorporate them into the community. The site requests that people go to the Introduction Forum to introduce themselves to the group as their first post. This encourages welcoming behavior from the rest of the community. What I did not find welcoming was the threat of deleting inappropriate material as one of the first things new members see. I understand adding this to the site somewhere, but it makes me feel like there will be heavy policing. It makes me realize that I may have to be responsible for removing inappropriate content, but I will explore other options for dealing with those problems when they happen.

I was also attracted to the organization of the site. The design allows the features like blogs, forums, and photos to have their own page rather than crowd only a select few, or a few too many, all onto the main page. I want to have the ability to include events, blogs, forums, and chat all with equal availability, but do not want to a messy layout. I will play with our design to create pages for our content and clean up our main page.

I explored each feature to see what gets the most involvement from site participants. Library 2.0’s site has heavy activity in some forums, while other posts within the forum remain unanswered. Some groups have many members with busy forums of their own, while other groups seemed to have trouble recruiting members with little to no content. The important thing is that some groups and forums survive, thrive, even, and the community will participate if the topic is right. If a forum doesn’t catch on right away, I might try rephrasing, or move the discussion to a group that might have more interest in the topic. Many of the groups with very few members had no content. I think it is important to learn from this. The content on the site must always be updated, evolving, and nurtured to keep the interest and involvement of the community. If things start feeling stagnant, I will try making a few waves of my own rather than waiting for someone else to do it.

The notes and events pages on Library 2.0 were completely blank. I do not know what the history of traffic on these features is, but I might consider dropping features that remain unused on More Than Books, or add guidance or content of my own to encourage using those features if I decided to keep them. The Photos/Media feature was not functioning when I tried to open the page.

I found it very valuable to study other social networking communities while building a community of my own to learn how to make More Than Books a valuable site for sharing and networking. The audience of More Than Books is much the same of the librarian audience of Library 2.0, making the observations of this particular site extremely helpful in building a successful site.

Come visit us at www.morethanbooks.ning.com/ to see how we are evolving!

http://morethanbooks.ning.com/