Dan Ream's Blog

Found an interesting introduction to an organization that connects pro bono legal services to social entrepreneurs. It's called LawForChange

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Although this could have been easily retrieved via Cabell Library's Special Collections and Archives, it is somehow more exciting that an acquaintance, while exploring the bowels of a small college classroom building in another state, last year came across a 56 year old, May, 1954 Bulletin of the Richmond Professional Institute, precursor to Virginia Commonwealth University. Below are the cover, the entry about the RPI library, and the fees for May, 1954. Wow!

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David Cloutman, Electronic Services Librarian at the Marin County (CA) Free Library
offered this interesting cautionary tale about how an organization's Facebook presence might not always be a good thing. From the Web4Lib listserv (Sept 10, 2009) (reprinted here with David's permission)...

"......you can publish news about your library (good) which will show up in the feeds of your "fans" (good). What often happens after that is some of your fans, who would not have communicated through Facebook ordinarily start commenting, and possibly dialoging. This can be good or bad, but consider this real life scenario.

I live in the San Francisco Bay Area. We have several fine aquariums
here, but the best known is a little further south in Monterey. I saw
that other people I know had become fans of the Monterey Bay Aquarium
and so I did so myself.

The Aquarium folks were pretty good. They didn't over-post, and usually
what they did put in my feed was mildly entertaining and occasionally
made the think, "Ooo... pretty fish." Then one day they posted about how
they had trained their sea otters to do tricks for the public, and a
major meltdown followed.

One person posted a comment that they didn't believe training the otters
to do tricks was in keeping with the scientific and educational mission
of the Aquarium, which has a reputation of bring a fairly serious
institution that does hard science. Another person posted back that they
knew sea otters in captivity got bored, and this was a good way to
engage them. Someone else posted that it was cruel to keep sea otters at
all. Then the F-bomb started dropping, and pretty soon there were
hundreds of angry, opinionated, aquarium fans cussing each other out, a
pretty stark contrast to the high scale, family friendly experience one
gets there at the aquarium in person.

So now I'm not a fan of the Monterey Bay Aquarium because of how their
fans behaved.

Basically, my point is this. If you're going to do Facebook for your
organization, you've got to think seriously about how you're going to
monitor comments and keep everything civil. Personally, I don't want my
patrons getting in swearing matches about some esoteric library policy
or to spend my time policing them. Perhaps I'm being too risk adverse, but I
don't want a negative online experience that I have minimal control over
damaging the reputation of my institution. Of course, others' mileage
may vary."

(end of quoted anecdote)

The lesson being that if you're going to allow comments, which is all in the spirit of Web 2.0, then you better be prepared to moderate them!

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Having let this blog sit idle for too long, I thought I'd try posting a test entry before attempting something more ambitious here. Looks like I can still figure out how to create a link and add an image

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On Tuesday, July 17th and Wednesday, July 18th about 70 Chinese students came to be introduced to the VCU Library. The students' enthusiasm, sense of humor, and intelligence make them an ideal group to show the library and introduce research tools to.
Here are some photos I took of them at the end of Tuesday's and Wednesday's library visits.
Please forgive my limited photography skills.

You can read their blogs and reactions to visiting VCU, Richmond, and America here

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The shocking truth about what librarians do in all those meetings is now shown on a three minute video entitled
"The Librarian Dialogues" by Sam Logan Khaleghi

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