Gina

Last night I visited the class chat room.   No one was there when I first logged on, but then one by one 4 other people showed up!  It was fun chatting with classmates.  There was a lot of different conversations going on, so sometimes a question someone asked wouldn’t get answered.  For this reason, I couldn’t really see it being used for group instruction; however, I have used the Vista chat room in the past to work in small groups and that was pretty successful. 

One difference I noticed between Meebo and Vista was that Meebo allows users to change fonts and colors while typing, and even add emoticons.  I really liked that feature.  Also, Meebo shows the different users names in varying colors, so it is easier to keep track of who said what.  One disadvantage to Meebo is that you can only scroll back so far to see what was said previously.  With Vista, I believe you can scroll back through the entire conversation.

Note added 6/27: I wrote that before we were able to access the chat logs, which is a great tool in Meebo that is unavailable in Vista.

I’m very excited because some people are starting to cooperate on contributing to the library blog!  Karen (one of the pages) wrote a book review on it, and also allowed me to take her picture for a trading card to put on flickr.  And I got a picture of Frank (the director), and he is going to write some reviews. 

The only negative consequence I anticipated was the hesitancy of staff members to participate.  But I feel that even if I get 4-5 people contributing consistently, the blog could be a great success.  I have already shown Karen how to get started (an easy task since she is very tech-savvy and a willing participant).  For some of the others, if they are willing to write some reviews, I will offer to type up their posts for them.  I feel that over time, though, more and more people will be contributing on their own.  This is not complicated technology to learn; it’s mainly a matter of willingness on staff members’ parts.

As far as dealing with patron contributions and “spamming,” I think I will have the blog set up so that comments will need to be approved.  I will state somewhere on the blog that anything inappropriate will be deleted.

The blog is coming along well.  I’m trying to get staff members to contribute book reviews so that we have a good mix when we’re ready to publicize it.  I am also planning to take pictures of the contributors so that I can create trading cards to link to on flickr.

At this point, I should probably describe the library and the patrons we serve.  Kent is a town with a population of about 15,000.  It’s a mixed socio-economic community, and our patrons reflect that.  In addition, our patrons run the gamut when it comes to computer literacy.  I feel there are a lot of people who are very unaware of what the library has to offer, especially when it comes to online services (databases, etc.).  I’m hoping this project will encourage people to visit our website more often, and perhaps increase circulation, as we plan to review mostly books in our own collection.

The staffing needed to keep the blog up and running is minimal.  Initially, I will be adding all of the reviews on my own time since it is technically a school project at this point.  We’re hoping that staff members will eventually contribute their posts on their own, and this can be done in any downtime during work hours.  I do anticipate a little bit of hesitancy with some of the less “tech-savvy” employees at first, but hopefully, when they’re shown how easy it is, they will be on board.

Today, when I visited the class chat room that was set up on Meebo, Rebecca was in there, and I was able to ask some one-on-one questions, which was great.  I hadn’t been able to access the Meebo chat box on the class blog, so Rebecca directed me to her website, where she has another chat box set up.  That worked great!  I’d love to have a chat box like that set up on our library blog, but I don’t think it’s feasible, since we don’t have a reference librarian, or anyone else, who is on the internet a lot at the library.

What I like about chat is the quick back and forth, as opposed to e-mail where if your question is not fully answered the first time, you have to wait for someone to get back to you once again.  The downside to reference services, as pointed out by some of my classmates, is that there is a certain expectation that goes along with the “instant” connotation of “instant messaging.”  Also, in order to justify the staffing needed for IM services, there has to be shown to be a need for it.  But how can a need be shown if the service is just starting up?  I know, it’s a conundrum.

When I took ILS-570, there was some discussion about “trading cards,” and I’ve wanted to experiment with them ever since!  So I grabbed the opportunity and for this assignment, I made a trading card:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/27572072@N08/2568841711/

This is the prototype for the ones I would make for all of the staff at the library where I work.  In fact, I mentioned it to my director tonight, and he thought it was a great idea.  Now if we could just convince certain staff members to consent to have their picture taken…

These trading cards would be posted on the library’s website, so that patrons could get to know the staff a little better.  Hopefully, providing a little bit of personal information might make staff members more approachable, especially with the teens.  Also, employees’ areas of expertise can be mentioned (for example, we have one woman who is the local history guru).

The main purpose of the Resurrection High School Library Blog is to provide information about library happenings and help students with research projects and homework assignments.  It’s a professional blog, but is fairly informal in its writing, as the intended audience is the students of Resurrection High School.  The posts are written by the three members of the school media staff, but there are comments and book recommendations from other faculty as well.  The blog is fairly new – started in April of this year – and so far posts have been written at the minimum of once per week since its onset.   The last couple of weeks, there have been numerous posts on the topic of various faculty members’ summer reading lists/recommendations.

I was drawn to this blog because my goal is to work in a school library and I think this is a great way to reach out to students.  I like these authors’ writing styles in that they speak casually, yet provide lots of information and resources for students, without talking down to them.