I have asked around some of the Gen-Yers that I know (an exhaustive analysis of the habits of, oh, about half a dozen - obviously a reliable and representative cohort!) about platforms like Second Life, Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, &c., and have had quite a mixed response.
NONE knew anything about Second Life, though were familiar with the concept of an avatar. So, in using this a library would have to be prepared to run an extensive education/advertising campaign; which sort of defeats the purpose - if the idea is to remain relevant by engaging with the public, potential and actual, where they actually exist - if they aren't using Second Life, could resources be better deployed elsewhere, their 'where'?
Delicious is what exactly?
Facebook ranged from the live on it, to the hardly use it, maybe once a week.
The common comment was that the majority of access took place via a mobile-phone; important for a library, apps must be mobile-phone friendly or they won't be used.
Texting seems to be the comfortable winner when it comes to the preferred platform for keeping in touch; which, for a library, is do-able for brief messages, not dissimilar to a tweet, but far more problematic for enabling resources to be shared (I would have thought).
Delicious.
ReplyDeleteAs noted elsewhere, the idea of social tagging among my (limited) acquaintance is met with blank amazement; never heard of it, purpose beyond grasping. Which makes me wonder.
Reading back through my notes I am reminded of a talk we were directed to by one Stephanie Lemieux, who discussed, amongst other things, the benefits of creating small specific taxonomies - to a task, department, issue, &c.
The obvious advantage of this is that resources may be grouped by any and all via a common tag, which then can be accessed with one click - akin to taking a library visitor to a certain shelf where all the resources on a topic, thanks to Dewey, are by and large aggregated; though of course in multiple formats.
So many of these ICTs are seemingly quite specific, serve peculiar purposes; I had thought that they would be more homogenous. Are they too peculiar?