Marketing men

When people think of marketing they associate it with advertising more than as an essential part of the work of the a librarian. Which is a good excuse for a picture of Don Draper from Mad Men.

Now I've got that out of my system I can talk about libraries! For me the modern librarian has to 'market' the service in the broadest possible sense - if marketing is providing the right services and making people aware that we are providing these services - which is surely part of what librarians should be doing every day.

Web 2.0 can help with marketing simply because it provides so many new outlets for contact with users, or potential users. A significant number of the things we've looked at so far can be used in this way. Facebook and Twitter are brilliant ways to keep in contact with people and tell them about new services, or remind them or services they may have forgotten about - surely marketing by another name.

The opportunities to connect with other librarians that Twitter and professional social networking like LinkedIn are also useful to see what other people are doing: sharing ideas and getting inspiration.

Also the possibilities of things like Delicious, RSS feeds and Zotero to help students are - in the right situation - an excellent opportunity to show how good library services are. Someone who is struggling with referencing, for example could be pointed in the direction of Zotero (or, in an ideal world, given training) by a librarian, and given a positive experience of the support librarians can provide.

Finally the Creative Commons on Flickr seem to me to offer a brilliant way to improve more traditional forms of marketing (posters etc.) as wonderful images can be found and used easily and for free. This is more interesting and professional looking which again hopefully gives a better impression of the library.

Referencing made easy!

Oh my word - I fear I'm a little bit in love with Zotero! I haven't had much experience of referencing software in the past. I had a play with Endnote towards the end of uni, but as I had already made reference notes for my dissertation by the time I'd discovered it, I never did more than having a quick look and think 'what a good idea' and then promptly went off and graduated and left the world of essay writing behind me.

I do, though, remember the sometimes feverishly last minute referencing sessions (it always seemed to take longer than I thought it would) at essay deadline time - something I hope not to repeat at library school. So basically, Zotero to the rescue! I did have to download Firefox specifically so I could run Zotero which is frustrating - as many people have pointed out, plug-ins for other browsers would be handy. The fact that I can see immediate applications for Zotero in my own studies suggests it could be useful for other students and therefore is useful for librarians to be aware of when supporting students.

Browsing and then saving references on the one screen is brilliant - no need to flick from window to window. Obviously it means you have to have Zotero installed on the computer you are using. This is the only really annoying feature of Zotero - you can't log into the website and then manually add a reference to your list. I can see this being frustrating if working from a computer elsewhere - you have to make notes of the reference to add to Zotero later. Delicious could be used for links in the meantime though.

Transferring references to Word works well, although you do have to check the referencing, but simply copying the references still saves so much time in comparison with entering them manually. I also looked at Mendeley in comparison to Zotero and in many ways it works in similar ways although trying to link it to Word created a few problems. It felt a lot less straightforward than Zotero because of this, Zotero was download and go, which is all part of the reason I'm slightly in love!

A breather

And I have finally reached reached Thing 13! It feels like it has taken quite a while to get here - I don't seem to be able to do a thing for half an hour a week, it takes me much longer to try out and then write up each new bit of internet loveliness.

Looking back to the start of 23 Things I said that I wanted to see how Web 2.0 tools that I've already used could be applied to libraries - and to discover some new tricks. I have certainly done the latter - I love the Creative Commons section of Flickr, something I've never really come across before. Delicious also has the potential to become really useful as I start at library school - helping me keep a track of any interesting articles I read.

Hearing about people's different ideas on how tools could be used in libraries has been a really interesting part of the programme so far: as well as coming up with some ideas of my own!

I am hoping to discover some more new tools before the end of 23 things as so far I have been familiar with quite a few of the things (aside from Delicious and Slideshare).

Mmm Delicious

Apart from the fact that whenever I see the word 'Delicious' I think of the Mexican town my housemate comes from (best place name ever: Delicias in the state of Chihuahua!)

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I was also quite excited to explore Delicious as from what I'd heard I thought it could be very useful in libraries.

This is true to some extent - I love the ability to create lists of, and share, useful links, I can see Delicious being a really helpful resource when trying to get useful links out to library users. I liked the fact that you can update the list constantly - keeping links up to date without changing how users access the list of links. As more and more resources become web based Delicious could have an important role to play. I also liked being able to add descriptive tags to links.

However, I'm not so sure about the usefulness of social tagging on Delicious for libraries. Being able to create an authoritative list of resources seems to me to have the purpose of helping students avoid clicking the first hit on Google approach to research. The social tagging on Delicious is no doubt brilliant if you're trying to find out more information about subjects of interest but for academic research, like so much of Web 2.0, it is only as good as the people doing the tagging and should therefore be treated with slight caution because of this.