Building Communities

Selected notes

Michelle McLean, Casey-Cardinia Library Corporation (public libraries in Australia)

Dating program very successful; 300 people took part; 200 took away

Inside a Dog
• Book reviews, authors in residence, author reviews, book news, forums, competitions
• Blogs
• Over 200,000 visits since January 2006; mostly kids going on themselves after school.
• 75% Australian audience; also 15% U.S.
• want to add podcast and video

Libraries Interact
• Independent libraries blog; no affiliation to one organization; all blogging librarians have their own blogs
• Majority of comments from U.S. readers

Second Life and VLINT
• Kathryn Greenhill – has organized an Australian libraries building
• “Virtual Libraries Interact”

L2 Unconference

Library Lovers Day

Has a paper in the conference proceedings.

Karen Huffman, National Geographic Society

Building communities
• Building teams
• Intersection between physical and virtual
• Decentralized approach with document management using HTML, JavaScript, wikis and blogs
• Library staff work with users to design solutions to their problems
• Once they gain traction with their groups, they teach them how to do it themselves
• Their teams are as dynamic in working in their organization as they are electronically

Nearly 50 sites within their organization; they help the teams organize their sites.

Weekly classes posted on a share calendar.

Research database – 1,000 documents, plus 1,000 more in the works

Also take a decentralized approach to records management – RIM managers meet twice a year as to what should be archived or discarded. System called “e-docs”; show how to use it during coffee breaks and via Webex for those in remote locations.

Intranet Team Site & Wiki
• Started out as a way to appeal to the Gen-Y group
• The Gen-Y group came in and created a mind map of what they would like to see on the intranet
• The Gen-Y team worked on creating an intranet incorporating the ideas.

Intranet Division Site & Blog
• Plug-in like application posts a thumbnail photo that posts the person’s photo (avatar) when they post comments.

Cross-Divisional Wiki: Kids 2.0
• RSS feeds to educational news sources

Wikis & Mashups
• Women’s explorer research database
o Collaboratively build a research site for women explorers, photographers, researchers and writers
o Divided by nationality/geography, and whether they have been contributors to National Geographic
o Amelia Earhart, Diane Fossey, Losang Robgey (Tibet)

Cross-team Wiki & Mashups
• Geographic information – each ladybug on the map represents a “bio blitz”.
• Want to make a KMZ file to show all the National Geographic projects on Google Earth

Brainstorming – “speed dating” style with users
• Each person sat at a different table for 10 minutes to help brainstorm
• Food and coffee (in the morning)
• Came up with a lot of good ideas

Desktops moving to the web
• Custom home pages
• Looking at IBM and Open Source

Second Life
• Gracie (with green hair)
• Should be in the social spaces where their audience is

Collaboration is key – for many years she has been “a community of one” but many people are now catching on.

Make sure your staff are playing the right roles so that you have covered all the aspects – some people are better at some things than others.