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.

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).

Visual distraction

Flickr is the kind of thing that I can accidentally spend hours on - I get slightly addicted to looking up places I know, or events I've been to. I like the fact that it almost acts as a visual Twitter, although not quite so up the moment, getting many different perspectives on large events if people are kind enough to upload pictures and then tag them. You can find such specific images on there - you can see my childhood home in the distance here for example:

With thanks to orangeaurochs.

There were even some images of paternoster lifts. My department at university had to be reached by a paternoster, which always used to break down on essay deadline days. There are a surprising number of lift-fanciers out there posting (working) paternoster videos on YouTube. I was pleased to see on Flickr that the one in Sheffield has similar technical problems to 'my' paternoster.

With thanks to iwouldstay.

Saying all this, however, I do think there are better ways of sharing pictures without the collective, social, elements of Flickr. I know Facebook has been mentioned by a lot of Cam23 people as the most effective way of sharing photos online, and I do certainly use this to upload photos of people who are also on Facebook. I prefer Photobucket or Picasa though if I want to show albums - with less of the community/tagging available on Flickr - to people without Facebook accounts or that contain pictures of no interest to my Facebook friends.

Where Flickr becomes invaluable to libraries though is in the simple copyright rules of the Creative Commons agreement. I hadn't come across the Creative Commons element of Flickr before and it is really useful to have such a large source of copyright friendly images - I can imagine when doing presentations, user education or library marketing materials in the future it will be a really handy resource.

You have been tagged

I was really interested reading Clay Shirky's piece about tagging and classification as I'll be learning classification on my LIS Masters next year and I so it was interesting reading a discussion about it.

Firstly I would say tagging (in the Shirky sense, used on Flickr) is something I feel is definitely useful - the internet is anarchic and user defined - tags reflect this. And like the internet tagging can be both brilliant and awful because of this anarchy. Looking at the tag cloud on Flickr for example

it's easy to see what people like taking photos of: weddings, parties and beaches, often using Nikon or Canon cameras. The tags become more useful when searching - a picture taken with a Canon camera of a wedding held on the beach for example would be the ultimate 'average' Flickr photo!

I don't quite see why Shirky is so determined to put this kind of organic tagging in opposition to more traditional library classification systems however - they are both categorising things but in different ways, and for different purposes. Library classification systems for physical libraries are there to make searching and
browsing easier - just as tags do on the internet. I would argue both types of classification - rigid and fluid - have their place.

I had flashbacks to the literary theory module in my degree and semiotics - words and definitions are difficult to pin down - different words can have different connotations to different people. Tagging reflects this:  if you're looking for something not recognised in more structured systems then a user defined tag allows flexibility. This multitude of meaning can also be incredibly problematic and frustrating if you want to find something specific quickly within a structure - this is why classification systems developed! I don't see any reason why the two approaches can't co-exist in organising information. Just like I feel I can quote Wikipedia and defend traditional classification systems!