Last fun duty of my year as SLA Europe president: about to chair today’s #elt2011 with @joeyanne @obnoxiouslibrn @kwelle #online11

— Sara Batts (@Batty_Towers) November 30, 2011

I think the panel discussion flowed well – there was largely agreement across the board on a number of different factors, suggesting that libraries across Europe are at a similar stage with social media (the panel had representatives from UK, Germany and The Netherlands). There were some really interesting examples from my fellow panelists – one example of Yammer being used for internal communication (in an international organisation with staff dispersed geographically), and one example of Facebook being used by a University before students arrived to help answers queries and help them begin to make friends.

The main messages I took from the session were that libraries and librarians should experiment with social media to see what works, and should aim to understand more about their users as no two libraries will use social media in the same way.

You can see the tweets from the session at the #elt2011 hashtag (thanks to @WoodsieGirl and @EBSCOUK for such comprehensive tweeting!) and there is a write up of the session on the SLA Europe website.
As mentioned before, I decided to get  information for my section of the discussion via a brief survey – many thanks to those who gave feedback. The main themes emerging from the results of this are shown below.

Social media use in UK libraries

• Many using Facebook and Twitter.
• A number using blogs, Flickr and delicious.
• Diigo, LibraryThing, FourSquare and Vimeo being used but not as common
• Few starting to create Google+ pages
• Some using for staff communication (e.g. Staff blog, wiki, Yammer)

Integration of services is becoming more common as is utilising one to many communication channels to feed from one place to another. One example of this is using RSS feeds to create a Netvibes site which sends out current awareness emails via Yahoo Pipes and Feedburner.

Difficulties in social media implementation in UK libraries

Strategy

• Management resistance (not used to informal conversational style and concerned about image it portrays).
• Balance between experimentation and the ‘just do it’ approach and the careful considered approach with policy, structure, branding etc.
• Restrictions of social media policies.
• Being seen as something distinct as separate rather than a core part of service.

Staff responsible

• Buy in from staff and lack of knowledge – one commented that they have colleagues who are scared of social media; another said it was considered trivial in their library.
• Risk of relying on just one member of staff.
• Keeping content fresh.

Infrastructure

• Access blocked in some libraries.

Users

• Lack of uptake from users.
• Concerns about negative comments.

Time, time, time – this was a common theme with competing demands in UK libraries at present.

Qualities needed for librarians using social media

• Appropriate style (formal/informal – ‘the personal professional’).
• Ability to judge tone and mood.
• Filtering and selecting information to share.
• Willingness to try new things and take risks.
• Flexibility and open-mindedness.
• Communication skills.
• Knowledge of users and different platforms.
• Determined/tenacious/enthusiastic.

This was summarised by one respondent – “The qualities any good librarian should have!”

Factors contributing to social media policy success/failure

Factors leading to success

• Promotion.
• Flexibility and trial and error to find the right fit for users, message and library.
• Social media embedded into library service.
• Sustainable approach (not just one person).
• Actively seeking comments on library to get feedback.
• Timely and appropriate content.
• Engaging, varied content (photos, videos, questions).
• Integration with other library media.

Factors leading to failure

• Using social media to broadcast (should be two way not one way communication).
• Failure to respond to comments/feedback.
• A poorly implemented strategy (worse than none at all – for example a Twitter account which only broadcasts and ignores requests for information will give a worse impression than no account).
• Not enough staff with access to account (therefore not timely responses)
• Too much focus on strategy rather than doing – need to experiment to try things out.
• Focus on tools rather than outcome – should focus on desired outcome.
• Not kept up-to-date.
• Over or under moderation.
• Facelessness.

Thanks again to everyone who fed into this.

If you work in a UK library, please complete the form below (or complete the online version) to let me know your views. The feedback is anonymous – though if you have something you are particularly proud of which you would like me to mention as an example of good practice – please feel free to include links in your response, leave me a comment on this post, or email me.

EDIT: Thanks for the responses, I have now removed the form as the panel discussion has passed.

It’s all well and good knowing how to set up a blog/Twitter account (and there are plenty of guides online if you’re not sure), but you need content to make them worthwhile. The personal branding “thing” I wrote for 23 Things for Professional Development sparked some interesting reactions and I know its not a popular concept with librarians but I was pleased to read a number of people’s blog posts who found it a useful exercise. Everyone has a personal brand, so I think it’s a worthwhile exercise to spend some time thinking about your own messages and your brand values to ensure your brand is giving a consistent message across all mediums and people know what you’re about. I hope that the tools developed during the exercises in the presentation today will be transferable to help librarians market themselves in face to face situations as well as via social media.

A copy of my presentation is embedded below (best viewed full screen – click on the arrow icon in the bottom right corner):

Is there anything else you would include? Any tips you’d like to share?

EDIT: My full write up of the event is now available over on the Evidence Base blog.

CPD23 logo

Many readers are likely to have heard of the 23 Things staff development programmes (also known as Learning 2.0) which have been used in a number of libraries across the world over the last few years. For those not familiar – it’s an online self-discovery learning programme used to introduce library staff to some of the technologies relevant to libraries (particularly social media). It’s achieved via a reflective blog which serves as an introduction to blogging as well as recording progress on each of the 23 ‘Things’ thoughout.

In the UK, a number of public and academic libraries have run the programme, including Cambridge who did it last summer. Some of the Cambridge librarians loved it so much that they’re doing it again – in fact this summer they are running two versions! The first is a repeat of the initial programme, whilst the second is what this blog post is about – 23 Things for Professional Development. So what’s that then?

Free CPD this summer!

23 Things for Professional Development is a free online programme open to information professionals at all stages of their career, in all types of role, and anywhere across the world.

Inspired by the 23 Things programmes for social media, this new programme will consist of a mixture of social media “Things” and “Things” to do with professional development. The programme starts on 20 June and will run until early October 2011.

Each week the CPD23 blog (http://cpd23.blogspot.com/) will be updated with details of the next thing to be explored.  Catch up weeks and reflection weeks are built into the programme, so it’s not a problem if you’re going to be away for a week or two!

Please do spread the word to any friends, colleagues, or groups that might be interested: please pass on this message and link to http://cpd23.blogspot.com. If you’re on Twitter follow @cpd23 and tweet with the hashtag #cpd23.

If you already have a blog and you’d like to register for the programme, feel free to add your details to the registration form (there will be a list of participants and hopefully a Google Reader bundle to subscribe to early in the programme). If you don’t yet have a blog, don’t worry – the first thing will take you through setting up a new blog and registering it.

I was invited to contribute to one of the ‘Things’ but loved the idea so much that I asked if I could be involved in helping to plan the programme. I haven’t done much yet so can’t take responsibility for the superb reaction it’s had so far (both in the UK and further afield), but it’s been really great to work with a group of such enthusiastic librarians. I can’t wait for the programme to launch! We already have people registered, and lots more thinking about it. If you are interested in sponsoring the programme, please contact us.

In addition to Ann’s presentations (which you can view from the event website), the morning session included group work in the form of pitching a business plan to “the dragons” (i.e. myself and Ann!). The groups were encouraged to consider which social web tools would be appropriate to use for addressing a particular real world issue (ideally one from their workplace), and present the idea to us as a business plan. As part of the business plan the groups had to to consider the audience and aim, which tools they would use and how, who would do it, and any challenges they think they might need to address. You can see some of the great ideas they came up with on the wiki.

After lunch it was time for the case studies, which included myself (from an academic library perspective) and Matt Jelfs (from a public library perspective). I’ve embedded my presentation below (best viewed fullscreen using the menu options); I talked about a number of different instances whereby a problem I have identified (e.g. engaging with users, event promotion, gathering feedback) has been solved using social web tools. I’m a firm believer in using these tools where appropriate, not just for the sake of it. Each of my examples took the same form:

Problem is identified → Needs are established → Solution is proposed → Benefits of chosen solution

Matt’s case study discussed some of the ways Birmingham public libraries are using social web tools, such as Facebook pages, Twitter (@bhambusiness for example), YouTube, and Issuu.

The day concluded with a final presentation from Ann about addressing the challenges, and then we had a Q&A section to end the event. I hope the attendees found the event useful, I certainly felt that it was a great environment for sharing and learning collaboratively and I particularly enjoyed the Dragon’s Den activity.

I talked about the importance of linking your online accounts at my talks at the New Professional’s Conference and the CILIP Open Graduate Day earlier this year, and at the time recommended using Twitterfeed to help you link your blog posts into Twitter. This is still a great service and works well with all RSS feeds, but if you just want to link your WordPress.com blog(s) to your Twitter account(s), you can now do it directly from your WordPress dashboard.

I was going to run through the process of doing this, but I found a great page on the WordPress support pages which includes screenshots for each stage, so rather than re-invent the wheel, here’s the link.

I’ve tested it out on one of my work blogs with our Twitter account and it works really well – you can edit the Twitter post from within the dashboard on your new post (in the Publish box on the right sidebar) and it posts almost immediately to your Twitter account after publishing the blog post. You can also use it with blogs with multiple authors and have just their authored posts going to their individual Twitter account which could be great for shared blogs.

Thought it was worth a blog post anyway, as it’s a somewhat hidden feature (well, I didn’t know how advanced it was anyway so thought others might not either!). At the moment this feature is just on WordPress.com blogs, but the developers have said they are working on a plugin to achieve the same thing on WordPress.org (self-hosted) blogs too.

Nicole Schultz (who also has an interest in social media) is responsible for developing the module and she came up with the great idea that it would be good to include podcasts from a number of different angles of social media. She has already interviewed companies who are using social media, a web designer, and other aspects of social media, but she wanted to interview me about my use of social media – how I got into it, what I use it for, and tips to pass onto other students.

It was great to meet Nicole (I also picked her brains about my dissertation, will post about that soon), and I really enjoyed the relaxed nature of the interview. It will be made available as a podcast for students studying the module and I think it’s a good way to practice what you preach and actually get students using social media during the module. The recording device was great too – really small and includes USB connection on device to download straight to PC. If I do some interviews for my dissertation I’ll definitely be looking into getting (or borrowing!) something like that.

I’ve recently co-authored an article with Christine Rooney-Browne for Refer, the journal of the Information Services group of CILIP, which has now been published in the Autumn 2009 issue. Refer offer some of the material from their journal online at REFERplus, and our article is available in pdf format, please feel free to read and let myself or Christine know what you think.

The article, “Blogging: an opportunity to communicate, participate and collaborate on a global scale”, is written primarily for reference librarians, although the majority of the material is general in nature. It was an interesting article to write; much of the material we already knew through our research interests and the fact that we both already blog ourselves, but it was interesting to research further into blogging and particularly some of the blogs written by, or for, reference librarians. We found blogs used internally for teams of reference librarians to assist each other in their work on the reference desk, reference blogs written about library services for the general public, and I also mentioned a personal favourite of mine, Swiss Army Librarian, which features a “Reference Question of the Week” – I always enjoy reading the enquiries he has had and how he answered them.

The process of co-writing the article was a new thing for me – we used e-mail and a wiki to communicate, and bought it all together towards the end in a Word document. I’ve also been trying out Google Wave recently though (feel free to get in touch if you’d like to add me as a contact), and I imagine something like Wave would make it even easier in the future to collaborate in such ways. It was good to bring our different knowledge and interests together in the article and I’m really quite pleased with the result. Many thanks to Christine, whom it was a pleasure to work with.

CILIP members living in the West Midlands will receive a print copy of Open Access soon with their CILIP Update, but it is also available online for anyone to read from today. You can visit the website (previous editions of Open Access are also available from the Issuu account), or view the embedded version on here (trying out a new plugin!). Comments on the issue are welcome, although you do need an Issuu account first.

Hope you enjoy the special edition, I found the other articles really interesting and it’s great to highlight work going on in the region.

The network is not part of the Communities area of the CILIP website, and is not attached to the CILIP Communities login. This surprised me, and I was a little disappointed to have to wait a day to be verified before I could take a look at the network, despite being a CILIP member and already registered on the CILIP Communities website. Having said that, one thing I was pleased about was that registration is open to anyone, even if they are not a CILIP member (although obviously it must be approved before being accepted). On the flip side I see the argument that there needs to be incentives to CILIP membership, but for this particular purpose I feel the network offers more value if it is open to all (UPDATE: unfortunately, this is no longer the case – the network is only open to CILIP members, which is a shame but I can see the reasoning.).

It wasn’t completely clear to me before being verified (which took about 24hrs) what the network was for or how it worked – CILIP referred to it as a sort of LinkedIn but it doesn’t have many of the same features that LinkedIn does. On the initial registration email it mentions matching members so I did wonder if it recommended other members with similar interests to yourself (like online dating might do but obviously for a different purpose!) but it doesn’t seem to do that.

Now I’m logged in I have found the aim of the network:

The CILIP membership is rich in skill and experience. This site is for members to make connections, share experiences and learn from each other.

Here’s a screenshot of the service once you have registered and logged in (I have just used my own profile as I appreciate it is a private area, when you log in there is an alphabetical list of entries similar to mine):

CILIP Network of Expertise and Interests

You can browse all members alphabetically (at present there are 119 members), or you can use the search functionality to find people. One feature which I really feel it’s crying out for is the ability to list people with a certain interest (these are selected from a list when you apply for membership so there should be consistency). These interests are included in the main entry on the home page, and are listed on each profile (see mine below for an example):

CILIP Network of Expertise and Interests - my profile

I wish these were links to take you to a list of everyone who has included that interest, it’s certainly what I was expecting (maybe I’m too used to tagging technologies!). I couldn’t find an easy way to list people by their interests and this is something fairly basic which I really think the network should be able to do.

There doesn’t seem to be any way to create groups either, and it seems the only way to contact people is by email, there is no way to send a message within the network.

It has potential to be a useful service and is good to be able to find other members with similar interests, but it is fairly long winded to use and the information is minimal. It’s more like a directory listing than a network really as it doesn’t encourage communication on the network platform.

I know I’m coming across a little critical, and I do think there are a lot of enhancements which are necessary before it is a viable alternative for LinkedIn (and as Owen Stephens pointed out on Twitter, one of the great advantages of LinkedIn is that different professions are all represented therefore providing links outside the library profession as well as within it). However, it’s great to see CILIP trying these new ideas, and acting on developing new networking methods as they mentioned mention in their recent Draft Council Paper on the use of Web 2.0.

One thing I am confused by however is the lack of publicity about this service. I don’t know if it’s a deliberate thing to soft launch to try the service with small numbers, but it seems to have been around for a while, and I wonder why it wasn’t mentioned amongst the #cilip2 discussions earlier this year. The CILIP representative I spoke to last week wanted to promote the service, so hopefully I’ve helped raise the profile a little (I know quite a few others on Twitter have joined since I mentioned it last week).

If you’re interested in finding out more, why not apply online and let me know what you think – do you see yourself using the network?

UPDATE: I wrote most of this post last week, but since then the page has been updated. Discussion forums have been activated along with a note that the network is hoped to be incorporated into CILIP Communities shortly. I’ll keep the blog updated with any new developments.