- Flickr can be used to great advantage to engage users in reading and books. One clever contest on the web was the creation of pictures of “book piles” based on a theme. These were very creative. Another cool idea was creating an API for the creation of a visual ‘book wall’ made of book covers. I can imagine a neat pictorial display based on colour matching book covers. Use your imagination to create really neat virtual displays to promote books to virtual users – just like you do in the branches. Don’t forget author pictures.
- Personal reading lists from library professionals can have great power. How do we promote our staff as the great differentiator of libraries from Amazoogle? For one we need to put their pictures and names on our websites and promote our folks. For another we need to let them blog and sign their posts. And for another we need to encourage them to create professional personal social networking pages in MySpace and/or Facebook. This will help us to promote books by promoting the library world’s great staff and professionals and connecting them to users!
- The nascent BiblioCommons project in Canada has launched at, among others, Oakville Public Library. Using the collection information housed in the SirsiDynix OPAC real end users will collect their own reading lists, advise others locally, and write reviews and more. It’s exciting to see communities engage with reading around their local library. Watch this one closely.
- LibraryThing for Libraries also allows you to draw on the collective intelligence of your patrons and LibraryThing members. You can include recommendations and tag clouds. You can let your patrons take part, with reviews, ratings and tags. There are now 50 libraries using LibraryThing for Libraries.
- Can you leverage the power of the long tail and promote more books in your collections? Of course you can! Author interviews, pictures, videos, book talks, podcasts, webliographies and more all sit at your fingertips. Two things challenge us. On the one side some libraries have long hold lists, and on the other end we have books that haven’t circulated well recently. Web 2.0 can help books circulate. Too many holds and continuing to promote access to something we don’t have available merely frustrates users.
Oh, and also now do the same thing for your DVD’s! Just start with the trailers on YouTube and blog it and maybe those 2-year-old DVD’s on the rack will start circulating again!
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Link to all 25 Things 2.0 can do for Books
P.S. I fixed the numbering of Part 3. It really was #'s 11-15, but it looked like #'s 6-10 were posted again.
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