small talk

I find my experience with facebook and Linkedin much like my experience with cocktail parties, lots of talk and movement, but little to really connect me with folks. As a solo librarian I long for the Annual Meeting so that I can have a real connection with my peers, something that is missing from my daily schedule. I guess it is a basic human need to be mixing among "folks like us". Being of a certain age, I did not grow up with the electronic word but instead needed to grow into the electronic frame of mind. Little did I know that when I signed up for Linkedin more than a year ago I was ahead of curve. I see it as a way to be "out there" professionally and to be a bit more visible than I am working at my desk. I believe that social networking can be used to connect MLA members but there needs to be growth and development on both sides. The technology needs to develop more degrees of revelation for personal information and ways to facilitate connections. Not knowing who is signed on to what tool makes it difficult to make the connection unless it has been done through a former technology...e-mail and even a phone call. Not sure of the age statistics for medical librarians but I would guess that most of us are growing into the Web 2.0 technologies and we need to give ourselves some time to explore and discover the "value" to these technologies. For myself as a solo librarian my days are full at work and so there has never been time for me to "surf" aimlessly, I have too much to do. Evenings I am usually too tired to sit infront of the computer since I have already done that for five hours or more. In time I believe social networking will become more and more common, we just need to give it a chance.
Given the very special nature of the ANA library...professional nursing (non-clinical) and only for headquarters staff, at present I cannot see a value for Facebook or MySpace for the library. As it is now I am afraid to advertise my services for fear of generating more demands on my time as I see project slip away due to neglect. Unless it can be a genuine labor/time saving device, it will need to wait until later.
I was very hesitant to put my name out on the web in Facebook. First off there is the possibility of making it easier for identity theft if someone takes the time to connect the dots. And who of us knows how in some past encounter we may have said or done the wrong thing, or not done the wrong thing, just upset someone. Well this makes it easier for that person to attack us or if they are technologically savey to manipulate our identity and generate ill will. Yes, I believe there are genuine concerns regarding privacy. This may be part of why it is difficult to find out who is on Facebook in the first place, not just the fact that I am an old fart trying to use something that is "cool" technology for younger generation.
I think I covered what I did not like about the Facebook experience. What I did like is that I was able to connect with a friend in Malaysia and Chicago in a new and unique way. I suspect that those connections may lead to others. I also was surprised to find out an old friend is on Facebook and we were able to connect through this experience.

This or that

So far I have created a blog and a wiki. I see the blog as individual and somewhat controlled in that I am the only contributor and controlled/static in the sense that it is limited by my experience and vision. A wiki may be on a particular topic but is much more open ended and dynamic since there are hopefully a variety contributors. Working as a solo librarian I see the value of a library wiki providing the opportunity to "put out there" information that may be requested frequently and that can easily be updated. In my situation I don't see the usefullness of a library blog since the only patrons are staff and the organization has less than 200 total staff. There is just not enough that is new or exciting to warrent a blog. A wiki on the other hand could be the drafting territory of material that gets posted to the web pages. I can see a wiki being used when there is a document on a particular nursing topic, and yet various individuals in different departments contribute their unique special knowledge.

Ricky wiki

You know when someone mumbles your nickname and it sounds like another word? Well this was a flash back to my youth when I mother would call me Ricky, a nickname that is only good until you reach double digits. Well when I first heard of "wiki" I could almost hear my mother calling me.
It has taken a bit for my wiki to catch on. At first I had created a wiki centered around the geneaology research I am doing on my family. Then I realized that I am the only person who would be contribting to the wiki and abandoned that idea. So I then focused on group activites and that is when I realized the montly pot luck lunches we have would be a good candidate for a wiki.
Library specific wiki use for our special library could center around staff contributing citations of articles they have read and recommend to other staff. This is currently done on a one to one basis. Making this more of a community sharing would open the possibility of others benifitting from this type of sharing.
I have just finished a meeting of the Interagency Council on Information Resources in Nursing of which I am president. One of the main products of ICIRN is Essential Nursing Resources. ENR is a compilation of all types of references and resources used by nurses in teaching, research and patient care. By moving this resource to a wiki it would allow it to be shared more freely and most importantly we could expand the contibutors to this resource and thus increase its value. I have put the idea to ICIRN but now I will need to work to make it happen.

nursing news

As an professional association medical librarian the application of web technology creates a challenge. The library itself is for the headquarter staff only and is not open to the public nor is it a member service, especially since there is one of the me and 160,000 plus members. What I do for members of the association I do through the web. A new feature in the members only section of the association web site ( www.nursingworld.org ) that I am working on is to provide a current contents of nursing literature around specific topics. My previous plan was to run monthly searched and have the results e-mailed to me. Then I would organize the results and post them to the web. Now I believe the RSS can pretty much automate all of this process, I just need to check with content management system provider to learn how to set up RSS feeds. My plan is to use the previous searches I set up as RSS rather than e-mail, and have the updates automatically. Also inhouse I provide a monthly search of new articles on PubMed that is focused around eleven selected topics of interest to staff. Now that I know about RSS I plan to created a RSS for each of the topics so that staff can have the information as soon as it is posted in PubMed rather than waiting for my automated monthly searches. It will make the information much more timely.

Welcome

Greetings. After all of my many years of experience in many diffierent fields it is nice once again to say that I am a newbie. All of this is new to me and a way for me to learn technology and polish my communications skills.