Academic Library2.0

OK embedding a video into the blog was ridiculously easy, just a matter of copying and pasting some HTML coding from the YouTube site onto my post.

This video is of a conference lecture on Building Academic Library 2.0 hosted by the University of Berkley in the USA. The video is long, it runs for 1 hour and 10 minutes however it is incredibly enlightening as to how to all these different Web 2.0 technologies are being implemented within libraries particularly academic libraries.

One of the issues raised in the lecture was the need to know your user. The University of Rochester hired an anthropologist to look at how students carry out their research. The anthropologist found that most students when beginning an assignment first called their parents for assistance. To tap into this the university library hosted a parent’s breakfast at the start of the year and educated the parents about all the resources and facilities the library has so that the parents can in turn suggest these to their children when they call for help.

The library director at Bennington College in Vermont has established a facebook page where students enter what they would like the library to purchase. Once the library has purchased the item they then message the student to let them know when the resource is due to arrive. Another library has put their historical collection of photographs up on flickr. The library has found many of the comments made by users to be very helpful and they have learnt a lot of new information about those items. Other libraries are creating links to their special collections on relevant Wikipedia pages.

One of the statements made in the lecture which really hit home was that libraries cannot become to focused on the digital medium and abandon their patrons who are not interested in technologies. Also that we cannot become too focused on the vision perfect rather use the establishment of these technologies within the library as an interactive process that is constantly being updated.