Thing #24 Looking for My Library

Lesson #24 for the new Nebraska Learns 2.0 program offered a chance to try looking up my library to see what was being said. I first tried Twitter Search. Amazingly enough I discovered that someone had posted a link in a tweet to the very last library blog I had written. It went out to her more than 1200 followers. I tried the link and it worked, taking me to the Polley Music Library blog. I thanked her, but have not had a response.

I then went to Bloglines. First I tried a "Polley Music Library" search in each of the various types of searches. Under "Posts", I got 9 results, 5 misses and 4 that really referred to my library. Of the good ones, 2 were my recent blog posts, one was a bookguide post of a listening list I had created, and the final one was an NPR post that mentioned the 20th anniversary celebration a couple of years ago. I found nothing in "Feeds". There were lots of hits under "Web". When I tried the "Citation" search, there was only one from an old post on the Polley blog. I tried limiting that search as described in the lesson and lost even that one result. Being curious, I decided to expand the searches and looked for "Polley Music" without the term "library". I got many many hits, but with even less accuracy, as there are quite a few people with the last name of Polley who are in the same blog post as a mention of music. I did subscribe via RSS, but there has been no additional activity.

I actually get comment about my library and its services (real and virtual) and collections (real and virtual) in person, by phone and even by e-mail. For example, this morning I got a "two thumbs up" about the links section of the Polley webpage in an e-mail.

I'm jazzed that the link to the Polley blog post was sent out to so many people by someone else. The best PR comes from our customers (real and virtual). And I'm finally starting to see that Twitter could really have some uses.

My library didn't gather much comment in this exercise, but if it had and I was aware of it, I could use these tools to either enhance it if the comment was good, or mitigate it if it was not so good. It doesn't hurt to know what the public is saying about your institution. But in my case, this week I heard that it was a "treasure" -- second hand. That's networking in the real world. This exercise was about networking in the virtual world. And we have to do both these days.

I will be setting up a Flickr account at sometime in the near future. Now I know why I should should subscribe to the comments.

Another session of Nebraska Learns is Starting

Well, I signed up for the new session of Nebraska Learns this morning. I've already got the blog and did the "prerequisites" last session, so all it took was an e-mail with a few pieces of information. And a month to do each "thing" or lesson sounds wonderful.