HOW DO LIBRARIES OFFER SOCIAL MEDIA INFORMATION TO THEIR USERS?

The revolution of new media and its interruption in information and knowledge management forced libraries to move one step beyond that and accept other media apart from print: audio recordings, video tapes, DVDs etc. until we arrived to THE major revolution with the internet and online resources.

Nowadays a significant amount of information is stored not only in articles or books, but blogposts, or even tweets that can change the meaning of whatever that matters in the world at that moment. In the past, knowledge was stored in voluminous Encyclopaedias, books, newspapers, magazines etc. Now, you only need a quick tweet, or a blog post, or even better a video in YouTube.

How do we offer this information to our users? Can they retrieve it through our Social Media Discovery tool? Could your users find Barak Obama’s tweets in your catalog? Or Barak Obama’s website, or videos as a part of a search? Do you think this would be useful for them?

Well, we think that “Yes! It really would be”. We also believe that this is the natural evolution of library services. Our users as well as our community researchers are using social media more and more to communicate and spread information abroad, and libraries, as information providers need to be capable of offering this content to everyone who trusts them by using their catalogs.

  

Wouldn’t it be great if all the content that our community members produce via social media were part of your primo results page? Imagine that blogposts, tweets, YouTube videos and so much more could be part of your catalog as additional records, just as printed material or online resources are.

You can do all this now with Social Media Discovery 

We’ve developed this powerful tool with your users and your library in mind. We wanted to improve library services, to help libraries and librarians move forward at the same pace that information and technology moves. With Social Media Discovery you can easily integrate all the content that you think is of your institution’s interest to your discovery tool results page, so your users will retrieve it as another record, or entry of your resources.

It’s easy to integrate, easy to use, and a key feature that will differentiate your catalog from others.

Where can I get it?

1. Sign up for your annual subscription with Greendata: http://www.socialmedia-discovery.com
2. Download and install the SMD extension from the Google Chrome Web Store or the Add-ons Firefox page, whichever you prefer.
3. Configure

How does it work?

1.  Visit a website which you think is relevant for your institution's users, for instance Barak Obama’s twitter page.

2.   Click the Social Media Discovery icon next to the navigation bar. Check and change the fields according to your criteria and click Save Record.

3.  That's it! The record is saved in the Social Media Discovery service. You can publish, unpublish, edit and delete the saved records from the Records page. 

4. Now, you only have to wait till the indexing is finished to find it in your results page:

READGROUPS E-XPERIENCE : LLORET DE MAR LIBRARY CASE

Interview with Lidia Bartolome, librarian at  Lloret de Mar Library

The Lloret de Mar Library has experience in managing virtual reading clubs as they manage a Facebook group, Bibliolloret, which works pretty well and aims to be a relaxed group of comments. ReadGroups has helped them to manage these clubs more efficiently and to reach more users.

They organized their first virtual reading club from their Facebook group, which consisted of a one-hour monthly meeting to discuss scheduled readings in advance.

One of the advantages of virtual reading clubs such as ReadGroups, is that they offer the opportunity to prepare comments before you share them, of course a great benefit for the more shy users. However, the biggest benefit would definitely be the possibility to participate at any time within the period the reading is open.

Lloret de Mar Library team

"When we had the opportunity to use ReadGroups, some of the regular users continued following us. The experience has been very positive. Having an organized platform to navigate is a great advantage in comparison with the chaos of organizing a virtual meeting in a Facebook group. It has also allowed us to monitor the comments and to give the participants a more freedom to participate whenever they want. " Says Lidia, Librarian at Lloret de Mar Library.

"In addition, ReadGroups has allowed us to reach people who were not involved in our previous reading club. People who do not usually move in social networks, Catalan students, etc, she adds". When asked what the main difficulties she faces when managing reading groups, Lidia tells us that developing quality programming is not always easy because, they are often catregorized by people and their interests. This then makes offlinereading discussions very difficult to moderate.

She also adds that it is common to find different kinds of people in the same group, for example,very shy people who don't like to speak in public and extroverts who overwhelm and monopolize the sessions. These differences make it very difficult to go in depth with the reading and comments.

Even though Lloret de Mar Library is focused on new technologies, Lidia stresses that reading meetings and virtual reading clubs are two different concepts aimed at different user profiles. Reading meetings are, to some extent, a socializing tools for people who have free time. For some users, the fact of meeting once a month with a group of people is more important than the activity itself.

Virtual reading clubs, however, attract readers with little time or incompatible work schedules to the library’s activities.

Firefox version of the Social Media Discovery browser extension

We know that many of you use Firefox as your main browser. For this reason, we wanted to create a specific version of the Social Media Discovery browser extension for Firefox.

The browser extension is necessary to catalog websites. The extension adds an icon next to the navigation bar through which you can capture the metadata of a website, fill the desired fields and save the records in the Social Media Discovery service.

From now on, it's possible to catalog websites and content from the social networks from Firefox.

The extension works exactly the same as the Google Chrome version. You can download it from this link:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en/firefox/addon/socialmediadiscovery/

In a few days it will be available from the official Firefox store as well.

We launch our new Help Center

We've been working in our new Help Center for some time, a portal that will contain all the public information about the products developed by GreenData. This portal will allow us to give better and quicker answers to your questions and publish information about our products, like the frequently asked questions, the bug lists and the improvements that are being developed, among other things.

In addition, the Help Center can be also used to publish new questions or to contact with a GreenData agent by email.

The Help Center can be accessed from ReadGroups, Social Media Discovery or direcly throught this link:

http://support.greendata.com/

Currently you'll find the frequently asked questions about our brand new application for libraries, Social Media Discovery, and some details about ReadGroups. In the next few weeks we will add more information about these products.

About Social Media Discovery

Social Media Discovery is a cloud-based service that allows you to catalog websites easily from the browser, like a tweet, a YouTube video, a blog article, a Flickr image or anything else.

Through a browser extension, Social Media Discovery captures the metadata of the websites so the cataloguer only has to check if the information is right and save the record.

About ReadGroups

ReadGroups is a platform for libraries of any kind that allows you to create and manage online reading groups, and participate in other reading groups as well.

ReadGroups has a modern interface, specially designed to help the development of a reading groups, with widgets of any kind: debates, quiz, polls, Twitter, Facebook and an embedded chat box, among others.

Add social media content in the library catalog

Today we want to share some great news with you: the launch of Social Media Discovery. Social Media Discovery is a tool developed by GreenData that allows you to catalog websites and social media content easily from the browser, like a tweet, a YouTube video, a blog article, a Flickr image or any other resource from the Internet.

Through a browser extension, Social Media Discovery captures the metadata from the websites and creates bibliographic records automatically. The cataloguers can add more fields or modify the data according to their institution's criteria. Social Media Discovery is a service developed for the libraries that want to offer a more complete experience to their users, through the integration of content from the social networks in their catalogs. Thanks to different exchange standards the records of Social Media Discovery can be loaded automatically in any library catalog or discovery tool.

In addition, in order to make everything easier and quickier, Social Media Discovery allows you to manage the profiles of the cataloguers. The service has an option to invite other users and let them use the browser extension.

Social Media Discovery is a SaaS model service that runs in the cloud. It can be subscribed from now on and has a completly free trial version, without limitations, that allows you to try all the functionalities.

We encourage you to visit the Social Media Discovery website and try the trial version of our tool.

If you need more information don't hesitate to contact us!