Who says libraries can’t be cutting edge, fun and experimental? Not me.
The Enoch Pratt library system in Baltimore is starting to use Foursquare, a mobile location-based network/game that allows users to “check in” to a spot, collect points and fun badges, and share tips and information about locations. They’re giving away prizes, too. See their tweet above.
Many think that Foursquare (and other apps like it) represents the next phase of the mobile Web — on-the-go users virtually interacting with their surroundings — that could be a boon for businesses and nonprofits, such as libraries. (There are rumors that Facebook is building a Foursquare-like app, too.) You’re starting to see companies (i.e. a Canadian newspaper) and now the Enoch Pratt library system, tapping into Foursquare.
For now, the Pratt is running the promotion primarily through Twitter.
Archive for the ‘Social Media’ Category
Social Web: Baltimore’s Enoch Pratt Library Starts Using Foursquare
Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010Posted in Libraries and Librarianship, Social Media | No Comments »
Standby! Video Content Might Finally Be Ready to Debut on Wikipedia
Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010Part of the reason why Wikimedia has to deal with a huge influx of data is that volunteers are increasingly uploading videos, and content partnerships with museums and archives have brought in hundreds of hours of additional footage. Wikimedia announced two years ago already that it was getting ready to include more of this content into Wikipedia. Little of this has materialized so far, but now it finally seems like video on Wikipedia is actually going to happen soon. So how is the free encyclopedia going to use moving images, and why has this taken so long?
Wikimedia announced a partnership with open source video platform provider Kaltura to get Wikipedia fit for video in early 2008. However, two years later, you’ll be hard-pressed to find any video clips on the site.
[Snip]
Wikipedia’s collective structure has been another reason for the delay. The site is ruled by consensus, and its tens of thousands of volunteers need to be on board with any major changes, which is one of the reasons why Wikipedia’s basic look and functionality have remained the same over the years. Walsh assured me that “Wikipedians are thrilled” about the possibilities of including video on their site, but Kaltura VP of Business and Community Development Shay David said that this hasn’t always been the case. “People needed to understand that video is an important aspect of Wikipedia,” he told me, adding: “That needed some time.”
Source: NewTeeVee
Posted in Social Media | No Comments »
New Facebook Page for National Archives in Atlanta
Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010Several months ago, we put together this compilation of social media pages that the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) we using to share info with the community.
Since then more pages have come online with the most recent going live in the past couple of weeks.
The National Archives at Atlanta, GA Facebook page is now available.
You’ll not only find information about the location of the archive along with info about events and images from places, events, and people in the Southeast Region.
Source: NARA
Posted in Archives and Special Collections, Genealogy, History, Social Media | No Comments »
National Libraries: The National Library of Wales Has Just Started Tweeting
Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010You can access the National Library of Wales Twitter feed at: http://twitter.com/NLWales.
Posted in Libraries and Librarianship, Social Media | No Comments »
The Economist — Special Report on Social Networking
Monday, February 1st, 2010Although Facebook is the world’s biggest social network, there are a number of other globetrotting sites, such as MySpace, which concentrates on music and entertainment; LinkedIn, which targets career-minded professionals; and Twitter, a networking service that lets members send out short, 140-character messages called “tweets”. All of these appear in a ranking of the world’s most popular networks by total monthly web visits (see chart 1), which also includes Orkut, a Google-owned service that is heavily used in India and Brazil, and QQ, which is big in China. On top of these there are other big national community sites such as Skyrock in France, VKontakte in Russia, and Cyworld in South Korea, as well as numerous smaller social networks that appeal to specific interests such as Muxlim, aimed at the world’s Muslims, and ResearchGATE, which connects scientists and researchers.
Source: The Economist
Posted in Papers, Presentations, Reports, Social Media, Source File, Web 2.0 | No Comments »
Report: Wikipedia Considering Indian Edition of Web Encyclopedia
Monday, February 1st, 2010The World’s largest online encyclopedia Wikipedia plans to launch an Indian edition of the website as part of its strategy to expand its footprint in the lucrative internet markets of India and China. The non-profit foundation is considering a proposal to launch Wikipedia.in, a local India chapter, similar to its country-specific portals in China, Germany, US and UK.
[Snip]
While Wikipedia is available in local languages including Hindi, Telugu, Kannada, Punjabi and Bengali, the number of articles in these languages is still limited. Wikimedia noted that language is not a barrier in India.
“In India anyone who has internet access has functional literacy in English, so language is not a huge issue, but the way people interact with the articles, shows that there is a lack of ownership and understanding about the fact that they can own and edit the articles. Lack of an India chapter is an issue.” said Achal Prabhala, an advisory board member of Wikimedia Foundation.
Source: The Economic Times
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U.S. National Archives (NARA) Joins The Commons
Monday, February 1st, 2010Please welcome the U.S. National Archives to The Commons, the world’s public photography archives on Flickr to which you can contribute information and knowledge.
With over 3,000 images in 49 sets uploaded already, perusing these important archival images should keep you entertained for a long time. Their four collections encompass important Americana, ranging from the famous Mathew Brady Civil War images to historical and iconic images of American history.
Step back to the 1860s to see Civil War battle scenes in the Mathew Brady Civil War Photography collection. Visit the DOCUMERICA Project by the Environmental Protection Agency collection, which documents everyday life in the 1970s. The Development and Public Works collection contains images of the Flatriver irrigation project in Montana. Their Historical Photographs and Documents collection contains milestones in U.S. history, including the Declaration of Independence, the Earth as seen from space, and just a series of favorites, including Ansel Adams.
Source: Flickr
Posted in Archives and Special Collections, Government Documents and Political Information, Social Media | No Comments »
Libraries on Twitter (updated list)
Sunday, January 31st, 2010Libraries on Twitter (updated list)
Here is an updated list of Libraries on Twitter. I decided to create a new post instead of continually updating the old post. Some folks on here haven’t updated their profiles in a long while, but I thought I’d include them anyway…
Also, in response to several comments about International Libraries that twitter, I created a new list in a separate post, for organizational purposes.
Source: Lindy Brown (Oregon State University)
Hat tip: ResearchBuzz
Posted in Libraries and Librarianship, Lists and Rankings, Social Media, Source File, Technology and Internet, Web 2.0 | No Comments »
List of Corporate Social Media Strategists, Corporate Community Managers in 2010
Saturday, January 30th, 2010List of Corporate Social Media Strategists, Corporate Community Managers in 2010
There are very specific requirements for this list…. 1) You must have a public LinkedIn profile page that 2) indicates that social media is part of your full time career and job –not just for personal use, 3) You must work at an enterprise class corporation with more than 1000 employees.
Industries included — airline, automotive, business services, consumer product goods, electronics/devices/mobile, financial services, health and life sciences, hospitality, media and entertainment, retail, technology/hardware/networking/component/computer, technology/software/internet.
Source: Jeremiah Owyang, Partner, Customer Strategy, Altimeter Group
Posted in Business and Economics, Lists and Rankings, Social Media, Source File, Web 2.0 | No Comments »
A Contest For the UK: Britain Loves Wikipedia Competition Starts 31 January 2010
Saturday, January 30th, 2010Starting 31 January and during the entire month of February 2010, participating museums in Great Britain are joining with people from all ages, backgrounds and communities to celebrate Britain Loves Wikipedia. The public is encouraged to photograph the multitude of national treasures contained in Britain’s collections, releasing them under a free license to be used to illustrate Wikipedia articles and much more.
The initiative is being spearheaded by the volunteer chapter based in the United Kingdom, Wikimedia UK. Wikimedia’s volunteer chapters (which now number at 27 and continue to grow) support the movement by carrying out fundraising, public outreach, and relationship building in their respective territories.
You can read more about Britain Loves Wikipedia on the Wikimedia UK blog here. If you’re in the UK through the coming month, join up and help grow Wikimedia’s collection of freely reusable images and media!
Source: Wikimedia Blog
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Twitter Working to Thwart China, Iran Censors
Thursday, January 28th, 2010Twitter is developing technology aimed at preventing the governments of China and Iran from censoring Tweets, co-founder Evan Williams told an audience at the World Economic Forum in Davos, the Financial Times is reporting.
Williams didn’t detail Twitter’s approach — in part to give no clues to the governments it hopes to confound — but described the work as “interesting hacks.”
”We are partially blocked in China and other places and we were in Iran as well,” Williams was quoted as saying. “The most productive way to fight that is not by trying to engage China and other governments whose very being is against what we are about. I am hopeful there are technological ways around these barriers.”
Source: Wired
Posted in Censorship, Social Media | No Comments »
Research shows online reputations matter
Thursday, January 28th, 2010Research shows online reputations matter
Research commissioned by Microsoft in December 2009 found that 79 percent of United States hiring managers and job recruiters surveyed reviewed online information about job applicants.
Most of those surveyed consider what they find online to impact their selection criteria. In fact, 70 percent of United States hiring managers in the study say they have rejected candidates based on what they found.
Review the results of the survey to see how online reputations impact people’s lives. The research comes from interviews with over 1,200 hiring and recruitment managers and 1,200 consumers in the United States, the U.K., Germany and France.
The results of the research reveal what you post on the Internet and what people post about you can affect your professional life. Learn what action you can take to manage your online reputation.
+ Research overview (PDF)
+ PowerPoint presentation
Source: Microsoft Privacy Day
Posted in Business and Economics, Papers, Presentations, Reports, Privacy, Search News, Social Media, Source File, Technology and Internet, Web 2.0, Web Search | No Comments »
Enriching Wikimedia Commons: A Virtuous Circle
Wednesday, January 27th, 2010Sharing in the sum of all human knowledge requires us to go to the sources. Beyond citations to books, journals, and websites, knowledge comes alive through images, video, and audio footage. We can travel to the beginnings of human history and admire the beauty of the Venus of Brassempouy carved from mammoth ivory 25,000 years ago. We can marvel at 2000-year-old mummy portraits that capture the dead in vivid colors. We can immerse ourselves in an Easter procession of the 19th century painted in incredible realism by Ilya Repin. We can listen to the earliest sound recording of a human voice, which could only successfully be played back two years ago for the first time.
Galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (a collective we refer to as “GLAM”) document, showcase, preserve and protect our cultural treasures. The Internet gives us the opportunity to share digital entry points to the fuller experience that cultural institutions can offer. With more than 340 million unique visitors every month, Wikipedia is the central entry point for research in the Internet-connected world.
The international Wikimedia volunteer movement is therefore naturally aligned with the public service mission of cultural institutions. Over the last year, we have seen an acceleration of partnerships to bring content online. This is also a result of the emergence of Wikimedia’s world-wide presence through chapter organizations founded by volunteers, which exist in 27 countries.
For the first time, we now have compelling data that shows the success of these partnerships, and the virtuous circle they can inspire. We also can use the same metrics to track the success of Wikimedia’s other content outreach initiatives.
The post continues on to include a large amount of stats.
Source: Wikimedia Blog
Posted in Reference Tools, Social Media, Statistics | No Comments »
Two Twitter News Items
Wednesday, January 27th, 2010First, “Twitter now has 75M users; most asleep at the mouse” (via Computerworld)
The number of Twitter users has climbed to a lofty 75 million, but the growth rate of new users is slowing and a lot of current Twitterers are inactive, according to a study released today.
The rate of new user growth peaked last July at about 7.8 million a month. That number has dropped to about 6.2 million new users a month now, according to a study from RJMetrics Inc., which develops online metric analysis software. The past six months, the study also noted, have seen a steady falloff in the number of new accounts.
“When you look at new account registrations, no one can deny that Twitter is still growing like a rocket ship. That’s good,” wrote Robert J. Moore, CEO and founder of RJMetrics. “However, upon closer inspection, the rate of new user sign-ups has dropped meaningfully from its peak and many new users never do anything with their accounts. That’s bad. Furthermore, the percentage of accounts sending out tweets has steadily declined over the past six months. That’s worse.
Second, Twitter has announced that they now show “Local Trends” for several areas. Instead of reading what’s “trending” globally, you can now get a local or national perspective.
From a Blog Post:
As Twitter evolves, and more people share what’s happening in their own world, we want to provide another way for people to discover topics that may be relevant to them. Last week we began to slowly roll out a new feature called Local Trends to expose what people are talking about on the state and city level,…
Look for the link to select the local area (or country) in the right column. According to Twitter, more cities and areas to come and you can always change your location.
Source: Computerworld; Twitter Blog
Posted in Social Media | No Comments »
Google’s Social Search Begins Rollout (Beta) to All Users
Wednesday, January 27th, 2010From the Article
Google has begun the rollout of its Social Search product, a way of seeing customized search results based upon the people in your social network. Social Search has been an opt-in Google Labs experiment since its debut in October, but will be available as a beta product in the “next few days” to all users on Google.com.
Overview of Today’s Release from the Official Google Blog
More in this October, 2009 Post With Material From the Official Google Blog and Danny Sullivan.
Source: Search Engine Land
Posted in Information Industry, Social Media, Web Search | No Comments »
Article: Social Media: A Guide for College and University Libraries
Wednesday, January 27th, 2010by: Andy Burkhardt. Emerging Technology Librarian, Champlain College
Because of the ubiquity of social media use, academic libraries can leverage these communication tools to interact with faculty, staff, and students in new ways. It is often difficult in academic libraries to spread the word about different events or services that the library is offering. Social media provides another vein in which to market new library products or initiatives.
In addition to marketing, the simple act of having conversations and creating relationships with patrons is immensely useful. Through conversations on social media, libraries can gain insights into what their users want and need and ultimately understand their users better.
Many libraries are already experimenting with different social media services like Twitter or Facebook to interact and connect with their patrons, yet there are still a number of questions that come up as this is still fairly new territory. “How do I get started?” “What sorts of things should I post?” “How can I grow our social media presence and gain more fans or followers?”
A Full Text PDF Version of the Article (4 Pages) is Also Available
Source: College and Research Library News
Posted in Libraries and Librarianship, Social Media | No Comments »
Library of Congress Adds New Photo Set to Flickr
Tuesday, January 26th, 2010It’s titled, “Framing the West,” and can be accessed here.
The Prints & Photographs Division added to the Library of Congress Flickr account a set of 22 western survey photographs by Timothy O’Sullivan, selected by P&P photo curator Carol Johnson. They are among the iconic landscapes featured in a joint Library of Congress and Smithsonian Institution exhibition on O’Sullivan’s work that is opening at the Smithsonian American Art Museum on February 12.
Master photographer Timothy O’Sullivan (1840-1882) created hundreds of amazing landscape views for two government expeditions into the Western U.S.–the King survey of the 40th parallel and the Wheeler survey west of the 100th meridian. Our photography curator Carol Johnson selected highlights spanning his trips from 1867 to 1874.
Look closely, and you’ll see traces of a photographic art quite different from today’s pocket-size tools. A wagon for equipment, a large negative made of glass, a heavy wood camera, and O’Sullivan himself. The large-format prints were presented on mounts about 16 x 20 inches. The smaller stereograph pairs were mounted side by side to produce a three-dimensional effect.
Source: LC
See Also: Happy 2nd Anniversary to The Library of Congress Flickr Account; LC Adds New Photo Set to Collection
You’ll also learn about other archives, libraries, and museums from around the globe using Flickr.
Posted in History, Libraries and Librarianship, Museums & Online Exhibits, Social Media | No Comments »
The 2008-2009 Wikimedia Foundation Annual Report is Now Available
Monday, January 25th, 2010The 2008–2009 Wikimedia Foundation Annual Report covers the previous fiscal year (July 1, 2008 to June 30, 2009) with a look-ahead to the next. This is our second annual report. The Wikimedia Foundation Annual Report is a summary of the organization’s financials, program activities, milestones and accomplishments.
Highlights include:
* Launch of Wikimedia’s Usability Initiative
* Wikimedia joins the Creative Commons
* Wikimania conference in Alexandria, Egypt
* Wikimedia’s open strategy planning process begins
* Successful fundraising and expansion of core operations
Access the Complete Document (13 pages; PDF)
Access Reports from Past Years
Source: Wikimedia Foundation
Posted in Information Industry, Social Media | No Comments »
A Google Contest Encourages African Students to Translate English Language Wikipedia Articles for Swahili Version
Sunday, January 24th, 2010The company is sponsoring a contest to encourage students in Tanzania and Kenya to create articles for the Swahili version of Wikipedia, mainly by translating them from the English Wikipedia. The winners are to be announced Friday, with prizes including a laptop, a wireless modem, cellphones and Google gear.
So far the contest, Google says, has added more than 900 articles from more than 800 contributors.
[Snip]
In e-mail interviews, two of the finalists in the Swahili contest said the arrival of Google on their campuses changed them from passive users of Wikipedia to active contributors. Still, they expressed mixed feelings about receiving material rewards for sharing knowledge.
Source: New York Times
Posted in Information Industry, Social Media | No Comments »
Brains Can’t Handle All Our Facebook Friends, Can Manage 150 Friends Max
Sunday, January 24th, 2010We may be able to amass 5,000 friends on Facebook but humans’ brains are capable of managing a maximum of only 150 friendships, a study has found.
Robin Dunbar, professor of Evolutionary Anthropology at Oxford University, has conducted research revealing that while social networking sites allow us to maintain more relationships, the number of meaningful friendships is the same as it has been throughout history.
Dunbar developed a theory known as “Dunbar’s number” in the 1990s which claimed that the size of our neocortex — the part of the brain used for conscious thought and language — limits us to managing social circles of around 150 friends, no matter how sociable we are.
These are relationships in which a person knows how each friend relates to every other friend. They are people you care about and contact at least once a year.
Source: The Times of London
Posted in Social Media | No Comments »
