atlas: the mission thread

i’ll get a bit ahead of myself and say that much of what i’ve read in the atlas makes me feel like i’m exactly in the right place. the atlas has given me words for some ideas that i’ve never had concise expressions for before. this is, obviously, good news for me.

about the mission thread … i appreciate the introduction to conversation theory, but it makes me wonder how much has to actually happen to realize what is described in the atlas. of the libraries i know, the idea of conversations about anything with respect to libraries seems alien. as a member of a large-ish public library i feel it is unlikely that anything i would say wouldn’t be heard by anyone who could help. there’s a citizen’s advisory group that might be the place where this feedback would occur, but the places where feedback might happen seem like they might not be effective, judging by the dates of various updates.

the conversations aren’t really obvious between members and librarians, either. it could be they’re not happening, or perhaps i’m not smart enough to know them when i see them.

without the conversations, it’s not clear much more could happen here … but i’ll reserve my judgment for the moment.

social media in libraries?

This may be a result of my newbie status, but I feel like there’s rather a lot of participation in social media by librarians and information workers, but not nearly as much social media reaching out to information users.

At the moment I have at least thirteen librarian and library blogs in my instance of Google Reader, and am following many libraries and information organizations on Twitter, but the instances which are oriented toward users don’t really seem to publish much. My local example, the San Francisco Public Library, has a blog for most of its branches, and some departments at the Main have their own blogs as well, and the blogs I’ve chosen to follow only seem to get a few entries each month. These entries are usually oriented toward promoting programming, and the new user might think there were only a few events each month.

On the other hand, the blogosphere is a really awesome resource for up-and-coming information workers. There’s plenty of experience out there and so much of it is made so easily available for everyone to use.