Building a Social Library

Today I had the privilege to speak with 40 high school and community college librarians about building a social library. The event took place at the Powell Library at UCLA at the invitation of Esther Grassian.

Though I created a Keynote Presentation (below) and demonstrated how one could use drop.io with groups, the majority of the presentation just came from the 75-minute conversation. All the relevant links are at the bottom of the post.

Building a Social Library

The benefit to a social library is we have an opportunity to reach our community with a variety of tools, most of which are free and easy to use. With a minimal amount of labor we can have a presence in many places where our community members exist already. It also sets the library how to be a leader, particularly in educational environments, and demonstrates value and expertise.

Typically in these types of presentations, the audience is overwhelmed with the options. This is especially the case when the focus is not on 1-2 tools. Therefore, I don’t worry too much about overwhelming the audience. In fact, I show a lot of options and then try to show how you can pull it all together with 1-2 tools. For example, if you use Posterous you can push content to just about any social networking site.

For the benefit of the audience, here are some the tools mentioned (bolded items had additional discussion) during the presentation:

• Twitter
• Facebook
• Posterous
• drop.io
• Get Satisfaction
• uStream
• Friendfeed
• Librarything
• LinkedIn
• Flickr
• Seesmic
• YouTube
• Disqus
• Brightkite
• Yelp!
• Delicious
• Twine
• Socialmedian
• WordPress
• Google Reader
• Google Voice
• Meebo
• Slideshare
• LibraryH3lp

Great questions arose from the audience and I truly enjoyed myself. We attempted to use DimDim to audio/video/screenshare the presentation but that piece would have worked significantly better if someone had been assigned to monitor and support the offsite participants.