16th Jan 2008
Librarians: practice social networking anthropology
Reflecting on my ALA Midwinter 2008 experiences, I find that I’m running up against the same issues I’ve seen before, but haven’t quite been able to articulate, about new technologies and libraries. I had a really good time talking out these issues with the likes of John Klima and Heidi Dolamore at conference, as well as with my helpful husband, and I think I’ve narrowed it down to a specific seed problem: context.
I find that, when I talk about technology and social software with new media peeps (because, you know, general technology and social software can be the same, but can also be separate topics), there is a deep level of reasonably assumed and understood cultural context, especially since many of these people are helping to build and grow the social software and technology of today and tomorrow.
However, when I discuss the same topics with librarians, there are only a handful who really have the proper knowledge context to discuss the issues without having to backtrack and explain. I find that even librarians who get the idea of social networking sites, social media creation, mashups, sharing, gadgetry, don’t quite have the cultural understanding behind the technologies in discussion. However, it’s very difficult to add the context to a blog post of ideally front-loaded content without making it super long and cumbersome. Thus, my writer’s block on the subject.
This is why, whenever I speak on the topic of social software, I emphasize culture. How and why a specific audience uses something is more important than how you want to apply it, essentially. Case in point is the session I blogged from Saturday morning for PLA on social networking and reference. In their efforts to perform “outreach,” librarians thought it was a good idea to try to figure out how to get around Facebook’s built-in messaging system… which was trying to prevent them from essentially spamming Facebook users. People who understand Facebook’s user culture know that this is *bad* and it shouldn’t be done, but these librarians thought they were doing a good, clever thing by trying to circumvent the system.
Beth Evans also presented in the same program, and mentioned that she was encouraging all users to “friend” the library. I know that there are other librarians who are encouraging users to “friend” them as individuals, and who “friend” everyone back. I don’t think that all librarians have considered the social networking and relationship ramifications of doing this (I’ve touched on this topic before): is their account just for work, or are they using it for work and personal sharing? Are they sharing the same information with all of their “friends”? Do they only log in from work? When they log in from home, do they really want to be at “work” on their profile as well? Are librarians contributing to the decline in value of the real-world meaning of friend by encouraging everyone to just add them indiscriminantly, or adding people back just to be nice? What does nice mean for the future of social networking?
I was in the middle of drafting this post when I saw Kate Sheehan’s post float up as a tweet on Twitter. I commented that her paraphrase of me is spot on, as this post reflects, and further eggs me on to say that librarians need to study the fine art of anthropology when it comes to social networking. That’s the true key to user-centered design in the library world: it doesn’t start with us and our wants and needs, it starts with them. As I paraphrased David Lankes from the Saturday presentation:
As librarians, you shouldn’t “define your mission by cool features, do it by core principles,†thinking carefully about how and why people use these online spaces. We need to stop chasing all of the innovators and making second-hand copies of everything, and really create something innovative to meet our patrons needs.
Tags: ALA, alamidwinter2008, conference, culture, Facebook, social media, social networking, technology, web2.0
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[...] Andrea Mercado and Kate Sheehan have both written insightful posts about the importance of librarians being aware of the culture of the social technologies they’re getting involved in for outreach purposes. [...]
Great post. I think that librarians who are interested in this stuff need to try it *as themselves* and do it because they enjoy it and are interested, and not because they are out to bring the good word of librarianship to the unsaved masses of $social_networking_site.
Thanks for the kudos, Steve. My question now is how to do we get the technology cheerleading to stop?
Also, I’m going to be making a concerted effort to find librarians outside of the tech cheerleading crowd as well as new media folks to help give perspective to the issue.
Any other ideas?
Andrea, thanks for the kind words in your post yesterday!
My feeling about the technology cheerleading:
Technology needs to be implemented as a response to a need. If you determine a need in a library, and the best tool to fill that need is social computing / web 2.0, great. Instead we seem to be doing the opposite: we have all of these web 2.0 tools, so we look for ways to use them.
[...] Mercado for the kind words she wrote about Catch and Release in her blog. Heads up: her entry “Librarians: practice social networking anthropology†has in it one of the most important concepts associated with participatory librarianship and social [...]
Just curious – is there any reason your PLA Blog post that you linked to here has been deleted?
Chad, that was a technical difficulties boo boo. There was a theme formatting problem in IE, and there were multiple people working on it… some posts were rolled back to draft status in an effort to figure out where the problem was coming from. All of the posts are back at their regularly scheduled positions. Sorry ’bout that.
[...] Farkas links to a couple of interesting posts on libraries in social networks, by Kate Sheehan and Andrea Mercado: both argue that librarians often don’t understand the cultural context of social networks, [...]