Comments on: Librarians: practice social networking anthropology

By: Simon Chamberlain’s library weblog » Blog Archive » Late January roundup

Wed, 30 Jan 2008 00:04:42 +0000

[...] 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, [...]

By: Andrea Mercado

Andrea Mercado — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 20:39:02 +0000

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.

By: Chad

Chad — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 18:06:34 +0000

Just curious – is there any reason your PLA Blog post that you linked to here has been deleted?

By: social web architectures / physical architectures. different rules of communication. « Catch and Release

Mon, 21 Jan 2008 03:07:04 +0000

[...] Mercado for the kind words she wrote about Catch and Release in her blog. Heads up: her entry â€œLibrarians: practice social networking anthropologyâ€ has in it one of the most important concepts associated with participatory librarianship and social [...]

By: Nate

Nate — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 16:15:10 +0000

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.

By: Andrea Mercado

Andrea Mercado — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 14:41:35 +0000

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?

By: Steve Lawson

Steve Lawson — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 22:39:03 +0000

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.

By: Understanding the culture of social networking technologies | Information Wants To Be Free

Thu, 17 Jan 2008 02:36:36 +0000

[...] 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. [...]