Information Sharing through Blogging

I am quite disappointed that almost nobody blog the recent CONSAL XIII. Is this means that not many librarians blog in this region. The reason I am disappointed is the fact that not many people could be in Manila and blog is one of the best way to make us ‘attend’ the conference. Sort of extended conference. So many people are doing it now at various conferences. The other best part is of course someone could comment on what presented immediately and also could seek feedback from their colleagues or anybody else online. Probably technically it was not feasible to do but a few hours late should be ok as well.

More on social software

The cover story Putting The We in the Web in the latest Newsweek is a nice read to explain what I have written about social software before. Again to me in the end the question is how can we make these tools relevant and useful for our organization and us? We can look at them from two perspectives, firstly, as tools to enhance capability and capacity among us and secondly enablers to enhance our services my incorporating them as part of our service to value add our offering. If you want to discover what other libraries in the west have done with these technologies. Read the latest blog written by Sarah Houghton commenting on a paper presented at PLA 2006 conference Community Building On Your Website: Library Blogs and RSS Feeds There are several examples mentioned that could trigger us to think of something new for our users.

Social Software and Networking

Sarah Houghton is right when she says most librarians forget about the Social Networking sites like blogs as one of the resources for librarians today. Blogs are mostly written by passionate people on certain subject. Most of them are also experts in their area. The usefulness of blogs is not only because it is written by somebody with the subject domain expertise but also almost always written with the right context. Hence understanding the subject matter is easier. Also the kind of comments and discussion took place sometimes are valuable to the understanding of the issue at hand. There are numerous blogs written and if you use Technorati, which to date search 31.1 million blogs, you practically could search on other topics. To make it even useful and searchable most of the blogs writers would Tag their blogs according to specific topics which you can also track and search by. Another useful social networking tool or site is wiki. A free collaborative online encyclopedia. Although not many Malaysian librarians aware of the potential of these tools it is not too late for some of us to strategically think about them as part of our service offering. I would love to see more librarians to blog. In fact librarian could easily use these tools to collaborate among themselves.