I've been reading some of the articles from Library Technology Reports and I'm proud to say that our library and City and have been getting on board with some of these technologies. We have made great use of blogs, RSS, and Flickr thus far. We also have a MySpace page.
My library recently closed for a month for renovations. This was the perfect opportunity to still communicate with patrons about the progress via a blog. The authors used many photos to tell the story, and it even gave fellow staff members an interesting chronology to show 'before' and 'after.' We use blogs to help promote programs as well and I think they are slowly catching on.
Our City has put in RSS feeds which link to news events and the City calendar. This is so great for the library, since we're featured in the news quite often and our programs are all listed on the caledar. Patrons can subscribe and see at a glance what is going on for the week.
The library has uploaded many pictures to Flickr. We're still experimenting with tags to make the photos more accessible, but we have a good start.
And, I agree with one of the articles which talked about these technologies, blogs in particualar, making the library's website more dynamic. This is so true!! In our case, we have virtually no control over the design, colors, font, etc. of our website, so we're looking at ways we can get around that.
I think libraries need to take advantage of these technologies, because they help market our libraries, help us learn what our users want, and help us communicate more effectively with our community.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment