David and Goliath Take on Social Tools

Section 1: Timelines

• Sonoma County Library's SCL Biz blog: about six months from initial idea to release

Section 2: Tools In Use / Under Development

• Blogs - both
  • SCL Biz - locally installed WPMU with Ajax Comments, FeedStats and Share This plugins
  • Moveable Type, but considering moving to WordPressMU
• Wikis - both
  • Librarywide wiki on pbwiki: systemwide policy and procedure changes
  • Children's librarians wiki on pbwiki: collaborative information sharing (screenshots)
  • MediaWiki
• Chat - Michelle
• MySpace - Genny
  • Santa Rosa library teen group has its own Sonoma Library Teen MySpace
• del.icio.us (Tagging) - Genny
  • Children's librarians are using to categorize homework links. 
  • Now all we need is a way to pull the links into the homework pages.
  • Ideally, we get or create a tool to pull the links into a local copy that doesn't rely on JavaScript to display.
• Feedburner (Subscribe to blog by email) - Genny
  • SCL Biz
  •  note that this acts like a newsletter when you offer email subscribe to RSS.  Promote it with other newsletters
• OPAC RSS - Genny
  • Whee hee!  Our ILS manager just got JTRSS working to create test feeds of new DVDs, books on CD, etc.

Section 3: Other Tools to Discuss

• Facebook
• Podcasting
• Tagging

•  Basecamp - Project Management

Section 4: Project initiation, Training and Buy-In

•  Identifying a need that "sounds like" a social tool
  • A librarian wants pages that highlight new business books
  • Librarians at many branches want to collaborate on program ideas, homework links, etc.
• Pilot projects
• Work with the enthusiastic staff
• Signoff vs. skunkworks?
• Training example: PowerPoint tutorial for librarians about business blog

Section 5: Measurement and Evaluation

•  Difficulty measuring use of outside-hosted resources (MySpace)
• Using FeedStats, Feedburner, local logs to measure blog subscribers & visitors
• Using standard web usage logs to measure blog visitors for locally-installed blogs
• Did it work as an outreach tool?