Social software, also referred to as social media, is ubiquitous in American society. Social media are media for social interaction that use web-based technologies to allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content. Wikis, such as Wikipedia, are an example of social media; a wiki is a multi-author, collaboratively created document, accessible by many authors via a specific url. One of the distinctive features of a wiki is that because it is created by more than one person, it tends to present more thorough, even, fair and balanced information; that wikis are subject to peer editing contributes to increased quality of wiki entries. Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, discusses the processes involved in creating and maintaining a community created encyclopedia, and concludes by saying that “The passion of the community is for the quality of the content.” Charles Allan suggests that wikis are useful for instruction librarians; librarians that are involved in library instruction programs can use wikis to exchange useful information, such as teaching methods and handouts for class sessions. This example of the usefulness of wikis in academic libraries suggests that there are likely many ways that wikis could be used in many different libraries; for example, reference librarians could use a wiki to collaborate in the formation of an answer to a complex email reference question.
Another aspect of social media that is particularly prevalent is social tagging. Tagging allows individual users to bookmark or “tag” web pages and save the tags. Tags usually take the form of subject keywords, but because tags are created by individual users, tags could refer to something that is relevant to the content of the web page, or some other category such as the author of the page, or something specific to the user creating the tag, such as the date upon which the user read the web page. Xan Arch describes this process as “making classifiers out of ordinary people”, and suggests several ways that tagging can be used in academic libraries.
Perhaps one of the first forms of social media to become popular was the weblog, now officially known as the blog. Blogs are easy to create and maintain, requiring only an email address. Blogging software provides a graphical user interface that allows the author to publish blog entires to the web with little or no knowledge of web authoring. In this way, blogs make it possible for anyone to be an author on the web. Randy Reichardt and Geoffrey Harder (2005, 109) point out that the use of blogs to build research skills is discussed throughout existing library and information science literature.
Social media will continue to be of increasing importance in libraries and in education generally, as students who were born during the Web 2.0 era of participation and collaboration reach high school and college. There are many ways that libraries can use blogs, tagging, wikis, and other social media to engage students and facilitate participation in the learning community.
Referenced Work
Reichardt, Randy, and Geoffrey Harder. 2005. "Weblogs: Their Use and Application in Science and Technology Libraries." Journal of Academic Librarianship 25 (3): 105-116.
