EllenFilgo.net

I’ve been investigating ways to curate conversations that take place on the web, via social media and in other places. I’m doing so at this point mainly to be able to display some of the great conversations that happened in the two New Media Studies first year seminars (#nmsf09 and #nms_f10) where I was the Twitter-embedded librarian. So far I’ve been looking at Storify.com (where I have put my name in for an invite), Memolane.com, and Curated.by, which I have signed up for and begun to play around with.

Here is an example of a conversation that took place during #nms_f10 that spanned several social media tools.

What happened was that one student in the class had seen a CNN article about viral hits on the web, bookmarked using Delicious.com using the class’ designated hashtag. During the class that day, I asked him via Twitter (using our class hashtag) whether he was the one who had bookmarked that (I was still trying to get Twitter handles, blog names, usernames, etc. sorted out at this point in the semester…) and when he responded positively, I sent him the link to one of my favorite timelines that someone created using Dipity.com.

I like curated.by fairly well – they have a nice bookmarklet that you can use to create your “bundles” but so far I haven’t been able to see a way to easily reorder the items you put into your bundle. I’d like to add the final tweet in this conversation that I forgot to add originally, but if I added it in now, it would add to the top of the bundle, which would make no sense. I’ve contacted their support to see if I’m just missing something or whether that function is just not in the application. We’ll see. It looks like, from this Professor Hacker post, that Storify.com let’s you reorganize your content in the way I’d like. (Anyone have an invite they want to send me?)

So far, I’m really liking this type of social media curation, to tell stories, display conversations across different platforms, to archive content, or for marketing purposes. The possibilities are myriad.

I’m very excited to be the subject of an article by Jeff Young in the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Wired Campus blog called “Embedded Librarian on Twitter Served as Information Concierge for Class.”

The experience I had being the “Twitter-based librarian” to Dr. Gardner Campbell’s New Media Studies classes is really the highlight of my career so far. It stretched me professionally, to be sure, but it was also a whole bunch of fun! The students in last semester’s class took to calling me their “Guardian Librarian” and I truly feel like all of my Twitter students are my “charges.” Any time they want to tweet me a question, I’ll be there!

A Librarian and a Hashtag Handout

Last fall, I was faced with the challenge of getting the reference staff, none of whom had ever used instant message before, up to speed with the basics of how to communicate using the software. So I created this online tutorial for the staff members to complete on their own time. After a few weeks we got together as a group to talk about how we were going to staff our IM reference, our policies and procedures, and then we did a practice run at answering IM reference questions.

I have now licensed the tutorial under a Creative Commons-Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license. Anyone is free to use it and remix it for their own library training purposes.