Social Networking Links
A brief tour of the Social Web services being used by and experimented with at the Nebraska Library Commission.
The NCompass
blog is the centerpiece of our Social Web presence. On it we share Commission news, news of issues relevant to our users both
in Nebraska and beyond, photos from and of Nebraska libraries, and announcements of new podcast episodes, among many other
things. Through the use of RSS, our users can easily subscribe to the blog and receive all of the postings
quickly and efficiently.
The
Commission has a Facebook page for users to learn more about us. In addition, we have pages for
the Nebraska Librarians Learning Together project (posts and updates reflecting Nebraska librarians' and students' efforts to network and discuss library-related topics,)
and
NCompass Live (our weekly webinar).
We also have pages dedicated to Nebraska writers and stories—see
Nebraska Center for
the Book, One Book
One Nebraska, and the
Nebraska Book Festival.
"Flickr is a website that allows users to upload, organize, store, search, and share photos. Flickr fosters interaction between users by allowing them to mark each other as contacts, comment on each other's photos, and add tags to each other's photos. The Commission and several of its employees use
Flickr to post photos from events, their travels, and screenshots for presentations and the Web site. (For example, all of the screenshots on this page are being hosted on
Flickr.)
SlideShare allows us to upload our PowerPoint presentations to a central location from which our
customers can then link to
our presentations. Although this can be done by uploading them to our own server (which we also do for archiving purposes),
with SlideShare users can also view our presentations on the site, embed them into their sites, leave comments, and
subscribe to our presentations. SlideShare also supports tagging and contacts within the system. Think of it as a
YouTube or Flickr for PowerPoint. To print a copy of a slideshow you'll first need to
download it to your computer which we allow, though other's don't. In order to
be able to download a show, you will need to create your own free SlideShare
account.
Tumblr is known as a micro-blogging platform. This means that it's similar to a blog in which authors post content and others can comment, but in Tumblr's case, most of the content is not "original" content by the account's owner, but content such as links and images posted from the rest of the Web or other tumblr accounts. The Commission's account is mainly used to post content from our blog.
Twitter is a communication
tool that's been around since the fall of 2006. The
original concept is to answer the question "what are you doing now?" in 140
characters or less. Users can post their answer to the question and then
subscribe to the posts of others. Users can both post and read through the
Twitter Web site, desktop clients, IM and SMS. Currenly, the Commission is
using Twitter to share information about libraries and librarians.
YouTube allows us to upload videos in a social environment. Users can then view, comment on, and subscribe to our videos. Through YouTube's favoriting
system, the Commission can point others to videos we think are worthy of their
time. Currently, the Commission is using YouTube to recruit new librarians to the
profession and to share staff presentations.