Deborah E. B. Keller, Librarian (Engineering), U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Humphreys Engineer Center, Support Activity Library, shares her insights and experiences regarding Web 2.0 technologies, libraries, and change in this article: Putting Web 2.0 in your Toolbox for Library Outreach.
This article was originally published in the 2008 Best Practices for Government Librarians: Web 2.0 in the Workplace and Beyond. The 2008 edition includes 70 articles and other submissions provided by more than 40 contributors from libraries in government agencies, courts, and the military, as well as from professional association leaders, LexisNexis Consultants, and more.
Read on...
Web 2.0 technologies are celebrated for their ability to bring people together. Indeed, the advent of social networking sites, file sharing programs, and collaborative software creation initiatives involving wikis, mashups and open source code have revolutionized the way that many of us make friends, communicate, and collaborate with others who share similar interests. Librarians and other information professionals have been among the early testers and adopters of these technologies since our business is, inherently, about communication as much as it is about information.
Like many librarians, I’ve tested out a number of Web 2.0 tools and integrated some into my daily activities. It is now much easier to read the news, follow both personal and professional areas of interest, and talk to friends. Unfortunately, I haven’t felt this same revolutionary improvement in how I’m able to do my job. As I pondered what to write here, I felt slightly overwhelmed by the challenges that these new technologies seems to present rather than the improvements that it brings.
Nonetheless, I am committed to bringing new technologies, including Web 2.0 into the way my library does business. Why? As the saying goes, the only real constant in life is change. If libraries do not embrace these changes, we will be seen as backwards and irrelevant. Closures, budget cuts, and staff reductions already threaten Federal libraries. Among our foremost responsibilities, then, is reaching out beyond our traditional library roles and convincing both our management and our users that we are still important, even necessary, to our organizations.
Be where the user is
In libraries everywhere, door counts are declining. This is true in my library, the Humphreys Engineer Center Support Activity Library, which serves the Headquarters of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, as well as many other federal, academic, and even public libraries. Why? Users will tell you that “everything” that they need can now be found on the web.
Like most librarians, my immediate reaction is to scream, “That’s just not true.” I’ve spent hours explaining the difference between subscription databases and free sources, educating patrons about scholarly and authoritative sources, and preaching about the enduring value of library resources. But, it is simply easier for patrons to do a quick search in Google or some other search engine, compare a web page or two, and feel satisfied that they have “something” which answers their question or supports their position. I’m frankly getting tired of fighting this never ending battle. In addition, my library’s geographic separation from a large part of our user community leads us to adopt the strategy, “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.”
Our users are primarily executives who spend much of their day answering e-mail and attending meetings. They don’t often have time to visit the library’s website and may not be able to find it on our agency’s homepage. They may not know which of the library’s subscription databases contain articles that are relevant to their field of interest. We’ve already adopted strategies of delivering books and journals to the users desk’s as a way of overcoming the distance between them and the library. For us, Web 2.0’s “push” technologies seemed to be a natural extension of this trend.
In October 2007, the reference librarians started blogging. In response to patrons who were used to seeing a list of new books appear on our website periodically, we began to write short reviews of our new books on a blog branded to blend into our library website. We advertise our blog on bulletin boards, in library education sessions, and even bring the content to the splash page of our library catalog using RSS. Our site, http://hecsalibrary.blogspot.com, contains the name of our library and is hosted by Blogger. It is seemingly easy to find through Google if users add the term “blog” to their search or to look beyond the first page of results. Yet, six months into this initiative, our subscribers only number in the single digits.
If you build it, they will come
Like Kevin Costner’s character in Field of Dreams, I was convinced that the minute our library had a blog, people would start reading it. Clearly this has not been the case. Thinking back, I think we’ve made several false assumptions.
People are always looking for information, so they must also be looking for the library. In the early days of our blog, we assumed that just being on the web would lead people, both our users and others, to us. As I’ve already suggested, listening to our patrons has gradually told us that this isn’t true. Our agency has had libraries for decades, but as we started to visit our patrons in person to market our services, over and over we heard them tell us, “I didn’t know we had a library!” Quite obviously, if they don’t know that we exist, they won’t look for us. Instead, they will, and have, learned to rely on Google and the internet in general to fill their information needs.
We’ve advertised our service, so users will check it out. Marketing ourselves and our services is a challenge for many librarians. We feel that our services have value and are convinced that patrons will want to use them. However, it isn’t clear that users are paying attention to the posters that we put up or notices that we post online. I’m just as guilty of ignoring advertising—television commercials, ads on websites, and even the posters in the METRO stations—as other people. In response, we’ve started speaking to our patrons in person, one at a time. This is a tremendous investment in time and effort on our part, but it has allowed us to be sure that our messages are getting through to people. We can combine awareness, marketing of new services, and user education in one visit. This has also given us the opportunity to hear directly from them about what we can do to better serve their information needs, and gives us a chance to follow-up or reach out to other potential library users by tapping into their office networks.
We’re trying something new, so it must be an improvement. Society has conditioned us to believe that something new is always better than what we had before or what we’ve always done. I think this is a risky assumption for libraries. For years, we’ve been hearing about the coming of a paperless society, but it just hasn’t happened. There are, in fact, some indications that we are moving in the opposite direction. Many of my colleagues now keep BOTH paper and electronic copies of their documents. I’m also beginning to see the indication that people are reading more books, both in the professional literature and in the growing popularity of Amazon.com. Please don’t misunderstand me, though. I do think that our book review blog is an improvement. We’ve added reviews to what used to be just a list of book citations. We post entries almost daily rather than sending out a list every month or two. Our blog also allows people to receive the entries in an RSS feed reader, personal iGoogle or MyYahoo page, or in their e-mail rather than coming too our website to look at a bibliography. However, all of these are changes. Whether we’ve done something better or not, we are now asking our users to change their expectations and perhaps even their behavior. This will simply take time.
Technology is cool. People will rush to learn to use it. I’m interested in technology, as are many of the librarians that I know. However, this assumption isn’t true of all librarians, much less of the entire population or my specific user group. In talking with them, I’ve discovered that some of my users are quite technologically savvy. They are never without their mobile phones, carry mp3 players or iPods to entertain themselves while they commute, and even contribute to the collaborative workspaces for their project teams. When I talk with them, however, I often hear the questions, “What is a blog? What does RSS mean?” They aren’t anti-technology by any means, but they’ve only learned to use the tools they NEED. E-mail is a job requirement. Getting your news—whether from the Washington Post or from the library—by RSS is still optional.
Know Your User
Over the past few years, the professional literature has been full of research studies and discussions of the learning styles and communication behaviors of Generation X, Generation Y, and Millennials. These studies indicate that generation groups tend to be full of individuals who begin their research process with a search engine, conduct library research from their desktops rather than physically going to the library, and expect that their research results will be ranked by relevance, regardless of the source, like search engines do. These findings seem to be confirmed by the recent report on the so called “Google Generation.” Both studies indicate that young people clearly associate “libraries” with “books,” rather than information in general, and that they have preferences for interactive rather than passive technologies. What remains unclear, however, is the degree to which these research behaviors differ from those of preceding generations.
These two academic studies, while informative about the trends concerning research and communication behaviors of library users in general, may not be tremendously useful for those of us in Federal Librarianship. According to the most recent statistics available from the Office of Personnel Management, 40% of the Federal civilian workforce serving the Executive Branch, where the Department of Defense and my agency sit, is over the age of 50. An additional 30% are over the age of 40. In addition, employment trends for the last decade indicate that these Executive Branch employees are, in general, getting older. This 70% majority falls outside of the generations who have been studied recently.
Does this mean that earlier generations are not using technology, specifically Web 2.0 technologies? Certainly not! However, they may not be already using the same technologies as their children, the ones who have received so much recent attention. A considerable number of library users that I’ve spoken with have expressed considerable interest in technology, particularly when it is framed in a way that “makes their life easier” or “helps them collect information faster [or] with less effort.” These users simply need some help understanding the new software and integrating it into their current research behavior. User education, then, has shifted from being one focused on content or search to one focused on teaching about the techno-tools.
Most of the interest that we have seen among our users can be grouped as “push” technologies. Accustomed to having print journals routed to their desks, many users are excited when an alert can be set up in a full-text database such as those offered by Ebsco. During individual desk-side appointments, reference librarians currently assist users in setting up searches customized to their work areas and research interests. At this time, most of these users prefer to have the alert sent to their e-mail, a technology that is familiar and a tool that they are using already. We are beginning to see a similar warming to our library’s book review blog. Users seem comfortable bookmarking the blog in their internet browser or subscribing to an alert that will be sent to their e-mail.
While adoption is slow, even these tentative steps offer the librarians an opportunity to educate the users. The Washington Post, for example, is perhaps more appealing to many of our users than information being produced and pushed out from the library. However, once the user becomes comfortable reading the Post at his desk through an RSS feed rather than glancing at it over the morning oatmeal and coffee, it will be much easier to add library-generated content to their daily serving of information.
Producing a library blog and serving up database or other content using RSS will have higher payoff for us in the long term, however, than in the short term, so we can and should be patient when looking at the results of our efforts. For one thing, we are generating content continually. Indeed, many experts argue that information is growing exponentially. By using a blog structure as we generate information from and about the library, we are simultaneously making the information easier to retrieve over time and preserving it to be accessed in the future. Perhaps more importantly, time is on our side. As the Baby Boom generation retires from Federal service, they will be replaced by the younger Generation X, Generation Y, and Millennial workers whose information gathering and communication preferences have developed around technology. Simply put, libraries who integrate technologies will become increasingly more relevant as generational shifts occur among their users.
Don't forget about the LexisNexis Government E-Learning series. LexisNexis Government E-Learning webinars are fast, effective, and best of all -- they're accessible right from your desk. You can link to information on the series from the right sidebar of the Government Info Pro - just click the red Government E-Learning series badge.
DECEMBER CLASSES
Lexis 101: Each Tuesday at 11 am (EDT) and 2 pm (EDT)
Nexis 101: Each Wednesday at 11 am (EDT) and 2 pm (EDT)
Specialty Classes: Each Thursday at 11 am (EDT) and 2 pm (EDT)
Holiday Calendar-- no webinars December 23rd through 25th and December 30th to January 1st
DECEMBER SPECIALTY CLASSES:
DON'T FORGET! On-Demand Classes are pre-recorded webinars available for your convenience. Choose from Courtlink, Company/Financial Research, the new Public Records enhancements, and more.Just click HERE to access the recorded classes.
Have you been using Delicious for years or just been promising yourself for that long that you’ll figure out what it’s all about? Week 3 of SLA’s 23 Things focuses on Tagging, Folksonomies & Technorati. If you haven’t started SLA’s 23 Things then there is no time like the present. You can check out my earlier posts to get you inspired:
or just head straight over to SLA’s 23 Things site and begin.
Here's a few thoughts on Week 3 of SLA's 23 Things...
Module 3 starts out with Delicious. I’ve used Delicious in a number of different ways. My early experience with Delicious was as a resource to find what other people had bookmarked on a given topic. I found that it often helped me identify articles and websites pertinent to specific areas of interest that I would not have found so easily through going the standard search engine route. The tagging was what really made the difference. But it took awhile for me to step up to bookmarking things myself. I do it now for several reasons:
- My bookmarks are always handy because they are not just sitting on my laptop but accessible to me from any computer with web access
- The tags can help me organize and find bookmarked items that would get lost within the folders of my browser's Favorites List or never get organized at all
- I can share my bookmarks
- People can share bookmarks with me
- I can integrate the bookmarks into other Web 2.0 tools
- It’s convenient and easy to bookmark using Delicous with special bookmark buttons and add-ons for your browser or website
- It's very efficient and I'm all for creating effeciencies in my personal and professional life.
The next section of the module deals with blog directories, tagging, and folksonomies. I believe that you can learn a lot from blogs and so the blog directories covered in this section of Week 3 are important to explore. Technorati tags fields are integrated into some blog platforms such as Typepad. It’s another example of the way you can become introduced to one Web 2.0 tool by using another.
The last portion of Week 3 turns to Library 2.0. How libraries are using, and going to use, Web 2.0 is important to consider because it’s heating up, not simmering down.
Take a look at these Government Info Pro posts on the topic:
At a recent conference I also picked up this book by Michael E. Casey and Laura C. Savastinuk: Library 2.0: A Guide to Participatory Library Service. Chapters include: Brand Library 2.0, Finding the Road to Library 2.0, A Framework for Change, Participatory Service and the Long Tail, Incorporating Technology, Buy-In: Getting Everyone on Board, Maintaining the Momentum, and more.
I also recommend the 2008 Best Practices for Government Libraries: Web 2.0 in the Workplace and Beyond.
Of course, I'm going to tag this post in Delicious and it will turn up on the sidebar feed of recent blog posts tagged "SLA23Things" on SLA's 23 Things. A perfect example of some of the lessons of this module in action. Here's the direct link to the feed: Recent SLA23Things Bookmarks.
Information professionals need to take care of themselves too. Gov Gab, a blog from GSA that focuses on U.S. government information and services that can benefit your life, has had a number of recent posts on health topics including:
You can even subscribe to Gov Gab's health posts via RSS feed.
Also, check out USA.gov's Health and Nutrition page. It includes sections on:
- Food, Nutrition and Fitness
- Health News, Reference, and Portals
- Health Topics A-Z
Enjoy your winter and the holiday season, and stay healthy!
Rachel Kingcade, Chief Reference Librarian, Library of the Marine Corps, wrote this article on the use of Web 2.0 within the military library environment. It was originally published in the 2008 Best Practices for Government Librarians: Web 2.0 in the Workplace and Beyond. The 2008 edition includes 70 articles and other submissions provided by more than 40 contributors from libraries in government agencies, courts, and the military, as well as from professional association leaders, LexisNexis Consultants, and more.
Read on...
Web 2.0 embodies the networking of information in unlimited ways. Libraries have harnessed this to their advantage creating information connections and reaching patrons in multiple 2.0 formats. While open source 2.0 tools work well for public libraries, military libraries are the exception. Security is a critical factor given the nature of whom we serve and how, but that doesn’t mean 2.0 has nowhere to go in our environment.
Serving the military community means staying within specific guidelines and policies as laid out by the Department of Defense. For The Library of the Marine Corps, that means working with Navy and Marine Corps policies. Limiting? In some ways, but with ingenuity and flexibility, we are able to reach our patrons and provide the information they need using 2.0 ideas. For example, we needed a virtual collaborative space to build a reference resource, but one allowed by our systems administrators who follow
the protocols established by the Marine Corps.
As the reference desk is manned by multiple staff, each librarian has a
unique knowledge set which may not be fully shared with the other. Thus, we
decided to build an internal wiki using the open source software Wetpaint. What
is a wiki you say? According to Wikipedia, a wiki is “software that allows
users to easily create, edit, and link pages together.”
Wetpaint provides a wiki template one can utilize in the
private form, available only to staff through an emailed invitation. As The
Library of the Marine Corps is also home to The Marine Corps Archives, our goal
was to construct a reference wiki that allowed for cross collaboration between
librarians and archivists, as we often
share reference questions using different sources to provide answers. Hence, we
constructed the reference wiki around commonly used terms, topics, questions
and requests for information. Now we have a collaborative shared space between
archives and the library which we can update, access, and utilize in the
moment. This is particularly useful for those who work the reference desk less
often and for newer employees. In addition, this wiki allows staff to help each
other answer questions with the ability to provide correct information on holdings
etc. Each time an addition or edit is made to the wiki, all staff members
automatically receive an emailed update on the content. This keeps us up to
date with no hassle or lost information. Eventually, the wiki will be migrated
to our Intranet SharePoint site, but for now, we can get going with the
business of sharing information while complying with the Navy/Marine Corps
directorate.
2.0 is mobile and we like to capture that aspect of
knowledge sharing twofold. First, we show our Marines to look for the best
information, and then we show them how to keep up with it using RSS. RSS is
ideal for Marines in the field as it is a simple and fast way to receive info
without email. Pick an aggregator like Google Reader or Bloglines, subscribe,
and start searching for feeds. For those who want to keep up using their hand
held devices or laptops, it’s even easier. Let the information come to you, not
the other way around. Again, while we may not use this tool officially, we can
illustrate the appropriate uses, comply with regulations, and empower our
Marines in their daily work.
A recent LexisNexis press release announces the acquisition of IDEX, Inc., a leading provider of expert
witness content in the legal market.
Press Release Excerpt:
LexisNexis® Expands Litigation and Client Development Portfolio with Market Leading Expert Witness Content
LexisNexis, a leading global provider of content-enabled workflow
solutions, today announced that it has acquired IDEX, Inc. Financial
terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
Based in Overland Park, Kansas; IDEX is a leading provider of expert
witness content to the legal market. The company maintains an
authoritative, exclusive database of more than 1,000,000 records on
200,000-plus experts - including expert profiles, testimonial
histories, verdict awards, settlement amounts, authored content, and
expert depositions and court testimony.
The acquisition solidifies the position of LexisNexis as a leading
provider of expert witness identification and evaluation information.
New content from IDEX® complements expert witness data currently available from LexisNexis® through market leading directories, court dockets, documents, briefs, and public records offered through its lexis.com®, Martindale-Hubbell®, LexisNexis® Total Litigator, CourtLink®, and CaseMap® platforms.
CLICK HERE TO VIEW ENTIRE PRESS RELEASE.
Have you been working your way through SLA's 23 Things or are you still putting it off? Remember, December 15th
is the deadline for completion. Just jump in and do it. I'll be going through the
modules between now and December 15th here on the Government Info Pro.
As I said in my last 23 Things post:
As a member of the SLA 23 Things Committee, I can assure you that
SLA's 23 Things modules will provide you with a wonderful learning
experience and take the stress out of immersing yourself in Web 2.0.
You will get the gain without the pain of figuring it all out from
scratch. Best of all, you will be learning together with a whole
community of SLA members.
Here's a few thoughts on Week 2 of SLA's 23 Things: Blogging...
Week 2 is not just a way to learn about blogs but a way to move step-by-step through the process of creating a blog of your own and doing some actual blogging. I am a big believer in the value of the blog as a resource for gathering information and a tool for sharing it. Putting together your own blog will be a valuable opportunity to enhance your 23 Things learning experience and share your insights with others.
Working through Week 2, you'll:
- Develop a deeper understanding of what a blog is and what its component parts generally are,
- Identify and look at some blogs for inspiration,
- Learn how to set up your blog, including choosing a blog tool,
- What to consider as you begin blogging, including things like privacy issues,
- Considering the different reasons for blogging,
- Think about what you can accomplish with a blog.
Week 2 is where the rubber really meets the road. Grab your car keys and step on the gas. You're going to learn a lot from Week 2 of SLA's 23 Things.
This tip from the Weekly Tips from Librarian Relations Consultants on the LexisNexis Info Pro site talks about a new LexisNexis SmartIndexing term that will help you identify on-target articles about the current credit crisis.
The term: CREDIT CRISIS, targets stories regarding the
financial market crises related to delinquencies and defaults of loans.
Find out how to use it and see a suggested search in the FULL ARTICLE.
James King, Digital Library Innovations Librarian, Naval Research Laboratory, Ruth H. Hooker Research Library, shares information about a presentation at a recent Elsevier Customer Council regarding R&D funding. James is the Caucus Convener for the SLA Information Futurist Caucus. You can find the sign up for the caucus discussion list, a caucus wiki, del.icio.us bookmarks, and their FLICKR photostream on the SLA Information Futurist Caucus page.
Read on...
I was able to attend an Elsevier Customer Council meeting yesterday which included a fascinating presentation from a Kei Koizumi, the Director of the R&D Budget and Policy Program at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
Here's a link to his presentation and the book (an annual effort) that he presented. It does not paint a bright picture of R&D funding in the future for either defense or non-defense projects.
