Reader response: "Library 2.0 at a Small Campus Library"

Note: This is an assignment I submitted for IST 511. I couldn't find anything about social networking at theological libraries, but I think a small campus library is a similar enough environment that if I do find a job in a seminary/div school library, I will be able to apply the authors' experiences to my own situation.

In “Library 2.0 at a Small Campus Library,” Jason D. Cooper and Alan May describe the use of Web 2.0 technologies by the library faculty at Montevallo University, a small public liberal arts university in Alabama. The authors demonstrate how a small academic library with limited personnel, financial resources, and in-house technical expertise can take advantage of freely available Web 2.0 software to serve its users and promote library resources to the campus community.

The library’s experiments with Web 2.0 began in 2006, when two technical services librarians proposed the idea of a library blog to the library’s director. Given enthusiastic authorization to proceed, the librarians created a blog on Blogger.com which eventually included five librarian co-bloggers. The librarians used the blog to publicize new databases, announce important information such as a library closing due to a power outage, and promote readings and other library events. The director also used the blog to respond to patron comments solicited in the biannual LibQual survey. To collect data about blog usage, the bloggers tracked the number of visits, visitor location, visit duration, and other information with Google Analytics, finding that the blog received several thousand views each month, most of them, predictably, within close proximity to campus.

Following the blog’s success, the librarians experimented with other Web 2.0 technologies. They generated a custom RSS feed with ListGarden for new browsing items, creating a web page for the display of the 50 most recent items and linking them to the library’s online catalog. They also featured photos of the library and other local sights of interest on Flickr, using the geotagging feature to show where photos were taken and publishing pictures to their blog using Flickr’s RSS capabilities.

At a Library 2.0 Summit at Mississippi State University in 2007, three of the librarians met with librarians from other institutions to discuss the implementation of Web 2.0 technologies at their home libraries. Central themes included “the challenge of bringing together the many stakeholders within a large institution,” where the layers of bureaucracy can increase the time needed to approve a new program, and the importance for all libraries, given the public nature of Web 2.0 technologies, of “cultivat[ing] an atmosphere of trust among those who represent the institution in online spaces and among the directors and administrators who oversee their work” (p. 94).

The librarians who attended the summit continue to discuss the implementation of Library 2.0 at their home institutions on social networking sites such as Ning and Facebook. The authors summarize the significance of the Montevallo librarians’ experiences for libraries of all kinds, especially smaller academic libraries: “The software and Web tools described here are readily available to libraries of all sizes and budgets. Librarians should work with their directors and administrators to employ these tools as part of their ongoing efforts to effectively serve their campus communities” (p. 95).

Cooper, J. D. and May, A. (2009). Library 2.0 at a Small Campus Library. Technical Services Quarterly, 26(2), 89-95.