Attendees
Arthur Downing, Lisa Ellis, Stephen Francoeur, Joseph Hartnett, Jin Ma, Ryan Phillips, Stella Varveris, Michael Waldman
Intro
In advance of the meeting, attendees were asked to focus on the topic of social networks and academy:
- how do students use social networks and which ones are they using now?
- what might students expect of the library and its staff who are on the same social networks (for example, how do they want to interact with an institutional accounts on networks? how do they want to interact with us as library staff with personal/professional accounts on these networks?)
- how do faculty use social networks and which ones are they using now
- how is scholarly communication being altered by the growth of social networks (see, for example, this report by the Centre for the Study of Research Communications at the University of Nottingham titled “Social Networking Sites and their role in Scholarly Communications”pdf)
- how we we use social networks for professional development? for pinging the hive mind?
What We Discussed Regarding Social Networks
- a list of library vendors that have presences on Twitter, Facebook, etc.
- libraries that have Facebook profiles
- academic departments and offices at Baruch that have Facebook profiles
- Bulletin board for reference questions at the home page of the library at Shanghai Normal University
- the video “Hangout” feature in Google+ that Roy Tennant from OCLC used while we met that let him hold an informal video conference call with librarians who wanted to talk about the 856 field.
Mobile Databases Page
We got a preview of the mobile databases page that will link users to library databases that are optimized to work on mobile phones. The page itself is just an ordinary LibGuide page that looks kind of odd in a regular browser but renders in a much more mobile friendly way in a phone’s browser. The draft of the page shown was the result of the second round of usability testing; the release version of the page will be subject to one more round of usability testing.
LibX Toolbar
A new Firefox/IE toolbar is being developed that will let users search the catalog, our e-journals lookup tool, or Bearcat regardless of what site the user happens to be on. Another notable feature is that when the user is on a book page in Amazon or other online booksellers, a Bearcat icon will appear on the screen that when clicked will run an ISBN lookup in the catalog to see if we own a copy of that item.
