a long-overdue update on the special library 2.0 survey
Back, way back, in November, I put up a little survey asking about the use of 2.0 tools in special libraries and 68 of you kindly responded. I hope it’s not too late to say, thank you all for being so very obliging! There’s a category on the Blogging Libraries Wiki devoted to special libraries, but it’s probably the most under-used page on there, and I know that the lack of links on that page is not an accurate representation of the use of tools like blogs by these institutions*, so it was a real thrill to read about all the interesting ways librarians are putting 2.0 tools to work in special libraries!
* blogs, wikis, etc. in special libraries tend to be used internally, therefore there’s really no linking to them; I’d love to come up with a way to gather this information in the wiki anyway, but I haven’t put a lot of thought into that yet. Plus, I love the flickr set Nicole put up, with screenshots of the very 2.0 intranet she built, so perhaps Flickr is the way to go anyway.
So, I asked the following four questions in the survey:
- What type of library do you work in?
- What 2.0 tools do you use in your library? (the options were: blogs, wikis, RSS, instant messaging, social bookmarking (e.g.: del.icio.us), and “other”)
- Tell me a bit about how you use 2.0 tools in your library. e.g.: if you have a blog, what do you use it for?
- Can you comment on any issues you might have had while implementing these tools? e.g.: firewall issues, staff buy-in, etc.
Here are the responses. The first two questions are represented graphically, and for the last two questions, I grabbed a number of excerpts from the responses (stripped of all identifying info).
1. What type of library do you work in?
2. What 2.0 tools do you use in your library?
3. Tell me a bit about how you use 2.0 tools in your library. e.g.: if you have a blog, what do you use it for?
Check out some of these incredible uses (a gold mine of good ideas here):
- An internal blog where we try to share some of the research gems we find
- A what’s-new-in-the-library blog
- Experimenting with the idea of embedding federal government RSS feeds into resource guides for our executive departments using feed2js
- Social bookmarking for internal reference stuff
- Use IM constantly for collaboration internally and externally …It is business critical.
- A wiki/blog as another means to communicate news and information internally in our library.
- RSS is used but little understood
- Encourage doctors to use RSS feeds to stay up to date with their favorite journals. I help them create searches on PubMed that are saved as RSS feeds.
- We use a wiki for reference service.
- Wikis for compiling results of large group research projects.
- Personalized RSS feeds for users, based on their interests.
- A social bookmarking tool integrated in with the library system.
- Our Intranet is made up solely of 2.0 tools – blogs for communication and wikis for collaboration.
- A blog that only the librarians see, where we post kudos to each other, announcements and links to interesting Web sites.
- I was asked for my bookmarks so many times that I turned it into a del.icio.us catalogue.
4. Can you comment on any issues you might have had while implementing these tools? e.g.: firewall issues, staff buy-in, etc.
The responses to this question didn’t really surprise me. Implementation problems fell squarely into four categories: little/no staff buy-in, firewall/security issues, other IT/computing issues, and corporate issues (many of the responses below will flesh out these categories). What did surprise me was the absolute unwillingness of many IT departments to budge on the implementation of a lot of these technologies. I guess I’ve become really used to the academic environment, where almost anything is saleable if it’s put in the context of user needs or the user experience, not to mention the fact that research environments are quite different from for-profit environments (we have far fewer trade secrets to protect!). The discussion that followed the panel (where I presented the results of this survey; it was a local SLA chapter) unfortunately reinforced a lot of what I heard from survey respondents. At one point during the session, I suggested to an attendee that something like Feed2JS might be a solution for syndicating their blog headlines on other company web pages since they can host their own version of the script & accompanying files, and as soon as I breathed the words “upload to your own server”, I was met with jeering laughter from some members of the audience (and a panelist!)! Why the jeering laughter? Because the thought of asking their IT departments to load anything on a server was beyond outrageous to them! A dire situation, indeed. Anyway, here’s a sampling of the survey responses I received:
- For some I have to do more hand holding than others to set up RSS feeds
- Hard to get our group to post to the blog or even to read it!
- Admin didn’t see the use of blogs/RSS until I signed up my supervisor to Bloglines and made Bloglines her browser home page.
- Staff buy-in has been the hardest. They don’t see the need for the blog.
- library staff who I am hoping will blog don’t “get it”. They want to know why they would want to keep a journal, and don’t realize this is actually a good tool for current awareness.
- It’s hard to get people to write for the blog on the public site. Our intranet, however, is thriving with new additions all the time.
- Our blog and the RSS feeds from our portal are inside the firewall, so you can’t use a reader like Bloglines which is easier to explain and promote than some of the desktop readers.
- Firewall issues are huge!
- Our IT staff is very open so we did not have firewall issues.
- I want to incorporate blogging inside the firewall but tech people don’t know how to set it up.
- IT don’t want to cooperate.
- our parent institution blocks IM.
- Enterprise-wide web page “look and feel” requirements make it difficult to use off-the-shelf web-based wiki and blogging tools.
- Dysfunctional, backwards-focused centralized IT group … enforce so many restrictions that it is pretty much impossible to truly move into a Web 2.0 delivery model.
- IT department stifles any sort of new technologies.
- Requires a CMS for the intranet pages. CMS does not allow for wikis or blogs.
- IT department has really put the hammer down on any multimedia things such as instant messaging or view podcasts.
- IT’s reluctance to adopt new technologies out of fear as to what it will do to their system is our biggest problem.
The question with which I wrapped up my presentation was, how can we deal with these barriers to implementation and move forward? Some ideas we came up with:
- identify the “low-hanging fruit”: pick the technologies that are the easiest to implement & use, and get your colleagues (and manager) hooked!
- some admitted that they operate under an “ask for forgiveness, not permission” MO – do as much as you can without having to involve the IT department (which isn’t difficult to do with many 2.0 tools – free, web-based versions of these tools make it easy to take the reigns and try them out).
- while it might not seem to be the case, the management/staff buy-in issue is bigger than the IT issues. Why? Because once you have buy-in (particularly from management), there isn’t much IT can do to block your ideas/projects.
If you have any other ideas for how to get past these implementation barriers, leave a comment!
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