Flickr

gozo, originally uploaded by mbrashier2007.

This was a wonderful day on Gozo. I had spent most my trip on the larger island of Malta, but took the ferry over to Gozo for two nights. This day I had rented a bicycle and it was a beautiful, sunny day. I cycled to the sites I wanted to see, and took a lunchbreak eating ravioli at a quiet outdoor cafe looking out over the ocean. I loved the view looking through the flowering bushes here towards the shore and tried to catch it with the camera.

It's one of the many places I would love to go back to, but until then, a glance at a photo like this can bring back a flood of memories or one happy moment in time.

For libraries, the use of Flickr is less reminiscence than it is promotion and creating a sense of shared community, the idea that the library belongs to all of us and we want the user to feel part of it rather than a passive customer. We can let people know what's going on at our library and try to put photos out there that make them feel excited about what they can do there. With links to our website, and importantly, links from our website, we can hopefully pull in more of the audience who use each of those sites.

What's on the user's mind?

We work hard when working together a website or blog. When I get absorbed in the work, I think of the eventual viewers in the abstract, considering how it might appear to them or whether I'm getting across what I hoped, but what we actually need are ways to get feedback from individual users on what they want when they visit the library or website, whether they they were able to accomplish that, and what we can do better to make that happen. Feedback can shed light on where we've confused users by using terms clear and comfortable to us, but that can have different meanings in the real, non-library world. It also can be uncomfortable in that we're inviting the negative views, too-- we'll have to hear from those who don't think we're doing a good job or who might criticize something we prided ourselves on as a good idea. Asking for feedback on a library sites requires that we consider the feedback we're sent, consider whether we can or should change how we've been doing things, and send back a polite response to those who ask for (or demand) things we can't do.
We have a form on our site to Make a Suggestion. We also have our e-mail address prominent at the top of the site. Both welcome visitors to comment, but aren't actively inviting them to do so. What ways have you found to encourage feedback, to let users know that you want to hear their thoughts?

RSS Feeds and Aggregators

As librarians dealing every day with rapidly changing technology, it's imperative to stay informed, but what we have little of is extra time to keep up with our reading. RSS feeds collected through an aggregator like Bloglines help with that task by reducing the time spent hunting for relevant information. In one place, we can have gathered together articles from sources we've selected and can choose at a glance which individual articles we want to read or scan. It's also quick and easy to experiment with new feeds, giving one or two a try to see if they're useful or interesting enough to us to keep up with them.

A favorite feed of mine is BBC News Technology World Edition. There are a number of posts I skip over because they deal with strictly British telecom and credit issues, but it keeps me informed of what's going on the world scene for technology.

Our library's website uses feeds to provide a Headline News page, using feeds from CNN and the Fond du Lac Reporter, but that's not something I did for the site. It was done by a librarian at our system headquarters. So I wanted to try one of those services that lets you mix your own feeds, creating one with Wisconsin news stories from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and the Green Bay Press-Gazette. (I would have added my own hometown paper for sentimental reasons, but it's a small paper without RSS feed.) I let Blogger do the work adding it to the sidebar of this blog, but I will try inserting the code below as well.