Wed. short sessions cybertours
These brief sessions were held in the exhibit hall, off in a corner where it was a little more quiet, but with screen projections and microphones, which makes a big difference at times.
Social Networks for Business/Professional Use
Richard Hulser, Hulser Consulting
The first Tuesday cybertour was about using social networking sites for business purposes.
Why would you want to connect with people for business or professionally in social networking sites?
- because you can connect not just with your personal friends, but business and professional contacts
- because there are many sites for professional use, and new ones all the time that you can try out
- notices for changes in colleagues work so you can keep up
- it’s good to see our colleagues and what they are working on.
- helps so you can remember details about colleagues’ work, and who they link to that you might want to connect with for work.
- you can post questions and polls to share information with others
A few things to watch out for:
- be careful about other people importing your friends list, at times without your knowledge.
- be careful about uploading of other email contact lists, that can occur without your knowledge
- you need to make a profile, which may be cumbersome or time consuming if you subscribe to many.
Here are the social networking sites that the speaker referred to, with the advantages and disadvantages of each:
Linkedin: this one is the best if you need to choose one for professional contacts. The speaker subscribes to this as a paid service, though you can use it as a free service with less options. It is useful for professional contacts in a professional standpoint. good for connecting with colleagues within an organization in addition to those in your industry. It is easy to search for others in your area of work. A problem/distraction: some advertising is beginning to appear.
Facebook: key advantages are links to twitter and other networking tools, plus you can add photos and videos. A concern: you have to join it to view any substantial information about a person or to see photos, videos, etc. Facebook does provide a url to photos within facebook, that you can send to people who may not belong to facebook. Uses: friends of the library photo event phots.
Xing: more international; good for professional contacts for international businesses and individuals.
Stats are useful. The speaker found businesses in xing that are marketing virtual world applications that he didn’t find elsewhere.
Plaxo:another international site much like xing.
Naymz. A self-described reputation site where people can ener their knowledge ofyou and can agree to be a reference. This is free, but there is another paid version that has more options.
Myspace: First thought of the speaker is that this is not appropriate for business, but if myspace includes your demographic group, you do need a presence there. The look and feel can be radically changed to whatever the user wants, including music. A few problems: ads at the top may include a message that you don’t want attached to your site. Another concern: people mix up the use of myspace pages as personal or professional.
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Organization 2.0
Rebecca Jones, Dysart & Jones Associates
Rebecca’s talk was about the characteristics of the “organization 2.0” and how libraries are recreating their structures and processes to thrive in a collaborative internet-based environment. The entire concept of how organizations function is changing: will enterprise 2.0 software transform organizations?
She next gave some examples of researchers who are looking at this question and their thoughts:
Tom Davenport = web 2.0 applied to organizations: changes in the internet won’t change the power differentials that affect lack of trust, missing incentives, unsupportive cultures, or other factors. There is way too much power invested in the heirarchies of organizations, and these sites are often blocked for access by employees.
Andrew McAfee Quote: “My enthusiasm and cautious optimism about these tools stems from the fact that they’re already being used heavily and delivering huge amounts of value. This usage right currently takes place almost exclusively on the public Internet; Enterprise 2.0 is my shorthand for these tools’ migration behind the firewall.
If you believe that this migration won’t take place, you believe essentially that companies — interdependent groups of people with a common mission and a profit motive — are less able or less likely to engage in free-form collaboration than the mass of previously independent volunteer freelancers that have made Wikipedia, Flickr, MySpace, YouTube, del.icio.us, Digg, etc. so powerful and successful.”
Jon Husband: a techno-anthropologist who is researching 2.0 changes in organizations. Here is a quote from his website:
“We all know and understand hierarchy – the enduring principle of the institutions that govern us and in which we work and live. The people at the top of the institutions control the agendas and make the decisions.
And yet, taking decisions and managing organized activities are being impacted in powerful ways by interconnected networks of people and technology. The Internet is connecting customers, employees and communities and empowering them with information in ways never before possible.
Every week the impact of hyperlinked, horizontal and vertical networks is being felt more clearly and in more insistent ways. The impacts are creating new dynamics in organizations as well as emergent forms of organized activities that are based on participation and peer-to-peer interaction, resulting in nimble, responsive, and results-focused networked group / team structures.”
Want to know more? Look up organization 2.0 in rss feeds to follow this topic on the internet.
Organization structure basics:
- past structures are not effective for present or future work processes
- The younger the staff, the more comfortable with technology (Yikes! though she added that she is changing her mind about this) Instead she now thinks: the more comfortable people are with technology the more they are inclined to work collaboratively with new technologies overall.
- small agile groups move faster than large bureaucracies
- leadership and followership are important
- 85% of the time if a person is not working to their full capacity, the systems are in their way, not the person
Organization design principles:
- form follows function. Functions change quickly, form drives behavior
- reporting relationships create ‘tied that bind’
- collaboration decreases as distance and priorities increase. do you agree with this?
Rebecca Jones has begun a research project about how libraries integrate organization 2.0 processes into library work. She has found that 2.0 libraries are realigning staff on a team-by-team basis. They recognize that it’s the people skills and approach that matter the most. They know that the larger organizational issues have to be addressed, but…most haven’t gotten very far incorporating these ideas into structure.
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New Roles for Info Pros
Ruth A Kneale, Systems Librarian, ATST, National Solar Observatory
This cybertour looks at some of the interesting roles and jobs that information professionals have these days. We do much more than we learned in library school.
Jill Hurst-Wahl: she teaches how to use Second Life.
Joseph Murphy: Yale University science librarian. he set up social networking sites and instant messaging for librarians at Yale Science Library.
Amy Buckland – McGill University librarian. her work is entirely to organize the Second Life structure of her library. You can search the catalog in second life; she connects the processes of the bricks and mortar library to the second life library, including art exhibits and other events.
Laura Carscaddon – University of Arizona Business Librarian. Introduced 2.0 concepts in her library plus a friendfeed account. She teaches a class “social networking and you” for faculty as well as students and staff.
Part of her work is teaching faculty about web 2.0 concepts.
Joshua M. Neff – Library Society of the World, plus Content Developer at the Johnson County Library, working on projects for the JoCoTeenScene and JoCoKids.
