I think Information Overload will continue to grow as a problem with the exponential growth of the Web. Since it’s easier than ever to publish a blog, wiki, website, forum, message board, etc., there’s going to be a lot more content out there.

Our job as librarians today, and in the next five to ten years, will be to help the research and library communities find the best information. I think that librarians are already doing this with blogs and wikis. By posting information on blogs and wikis, we’re filtering and finding quality information for the user community. For those librarians who are early adopters of blogs, I think they are successfully building a community and audience for their services. In turn, this will help educate users that libraries and librarians are (and still will be) relevant and viable sources of information.

I’ve been doing a little reading about the “Game Generation,” and one of the underlying characteristics of this generation is their competitive nature. For them, winning is everything, and everything (particularly schoolwork) is a competition. The business curriculum encourages this competition, as the business cluster groups usually work on the same (or very similar) research projects. My theory is that posting comments on an open blog is counterintuitive to their competitive nature. If a person or group shares with others via open comments on a blog (or by other means) then that person or group loses the competitive advantage.

I will try using my IM screen on my blog as well. I had several chat reference transactions in the past. Honestly, I get more email questions than virtual chat reference, and I am trying to look for some avenues to see how they can be increased. The question is : Whether we should encourage IM questions? How about to distance learners? Has any one been using IM in online programs?

Jay

I enjoyed reading your article.
I agree with what you all are saying. Library blogs not only makes it easy to disseminate information but also quick to provide access to that information. A blog can be very quickly updated with new information for the users. We try our best to promote them, identify and experiment with different ways to show how they can be used, and motivate faculty members to integrate in some way to the courses they are teaching. In our new blogs, we have an option to enter email addresses for automatic notification to faculty and students who wish to be notified when the blog is modified with new content. A wiki can also be used for staff training, reference wiki, announcements about meetings, deadlines for projects, etc. besides for subject based use that Chad has been successfully using.
Question for everyone: How do you envision the evolution of blogs and wiki in the next five to ten years?
We all talk about ‘Information Overload’. What will be the nature of the ‘overload’ after ten years? Will the blogs help relieve this overload to some extent? If so, how? Jay

I think a blog CAN be a two-way communications vehicle, but most are not designed to be that and it takes greater effort and a committed population to make it work. Most library blogs are designed to disseminate information, which is great, because before blogs, that was much more difficult to do. And most of our patrons probably come to us looking for answers, not for a dialogue. Knowing that the patrons read the blog and get something out of it is really enough of a good thing, in my opinion. But sometimes, we don’t even know that much…

Great job, Chad!!! You are really a terrific example for subject librarians everywhere. I love how you never stop trying to find creative solutions to these common issues in providing services to students.

My presentation, ‘Subject Librarian 2.0′, was similar in content to yours, as was the one from the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, ‘Blog Applications at a Small Academic Library.’ Through all three of our presentations we’ve noted that while we had hoped for user interaction via comments, users were not interacting with us in the way we had hoped. Users are simply not commenting to our posts. While I would love to get some dialog going via my subject blogs via commenting, I’m not too worried that users aren’t commenting. I think that, in and of itself, it telling us somthing, don’t you?

Keep up the good work!