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.