This set of appetizers will look at how and why institutions use social media. Hopefully, they’ll help you identify which tools meet your institution’s needs and wants.

To begin the conversation, answer me this: why do you want to use social media?  (“Because I know I should” is a valid answer, but it’s not as informative as we’d like.)

To answer this question, think about who you want to reach. Maybe you want to:

• Draw in new users
• Target a specific community
• Broadcast across diverse communities

in order to:

• Increase your institution’s web presence
• Drive traffic to your site
• Market new materials or programs
• Give your community an opportunity to participate
• Generate a little buzz and good feeling

While we’re going to look at different tools individually, you’ll see that many of them work best in concert with each other (and we’ll look at some examples of that). We’ll start with twitter and Pinterest. (Other options for appetizers include Delicious, YouTube, WordPress, Tumblr, and Flickr - please weigh in via comments!) We’ll also get familiar with companion tool ifttt.

All roads lead to (and more importantly, from) twitter.

Because it seems to require two things that are hard to summon on command – wit and time – Twitter can be intimidating. But while wit and time are useful, they’re not necessary. True: a good twitter feed is updated regularly with useful or engaging content. False: a good twitter must be updated constantly with a succession of LIS-related one-liners.

One of the most common and stress-free ways to use twitter is as a link-sharing mechanism. Anything at all related to what you do, or that could be of interest to your followers, tweet it. Relate all things back to your collection or your services. Do you run a map library? Maybe there’s an issue in the news about distinguishing between Czechoslovakia and Chechnya. Tweet it. Another way to get started is to retweet from favorite or partner organizations.

We’ll look at some institutional accounts to illustrate how to use twitter. Specifically, how to:

• Share information
• Invite discussion
• Create access points

As we go through the different feeds, think about what you like, what you don’t like, and what you would do differently. We’ll start at basic and work our way up.

McMaster University libraries: @Maclibraries

@Maclibraries twitter feed

@Maclibraries is a good example of a simple, institutional information-based feed. It’s easy to tell who their audience is (students) by reading their tweets. They deal with relatively commonplace university library issues: connectivity disruption, new technology and services, jobs at the library, programs and events for managing stress, links to university news.

For @Maclibraries, twitter is an easy way to get in touch with students, who certainly appreciate being told that the printers are down before they travel to the library in a rainstorm. Students also appreciate being told, as you can see in the 2^nd-to-most-recent tweet, that the library has free cupcakes.

Toronto Public Library: @torontolibrary

The TPL’s twitter feed is often used as a means of engagement. Librarians (or whoever’s tweeting over there) ask questions and invite discussion. 

For example, TPL runs a program called One Book, an open book club formed around one book with a multitude of related events.  This month, TPL took it a step further with the TTC One Book Club, a twitter-based book club with designated hashtags, whose feed is broadcast on TTC platforms across the city. For the month of April, questions related to the One Book (Fahrenheit 451) are posted on the website and tweeted daily.

Companion website for #OneBookTTC

A few good things about this:

• The link with the TTC promotes serendipity by engaging people who aren’t already involved in the conversation.
• #OneBookTTC is a great and simple example of a twitter Best Practice: make it easy for people to interact with you. Give them hashtags for events, book clubs, or adopt hashtags people are already using.
• Also, conversation does the job of populating your twitter feed for you, as people respond to questions, mention you, and tweet at you.

As an aside, here’s another Good Use of Twitter:

responding to a complaint

This conversation was quick and easy, it gave the library feedback and let the patron feel like they were being heard and their feedback was welcome.

NY Public Library: @NYPL

Like other good twitter feeds, @NYPL starts conversations, advertises programs, links to industry and related news, and puts a public face on the library. Check out the mention of “Poem in your Pocket Day.”

@NYPL twitter feed

What’s notable about NYPL’s twitter feed is the way they create access points to library resources. @NYPL tweets all new posts from the NYPL blogs. These blogs (and there are a bunch) are subject-specific, which is identified in the tweet. The blog post then links to library holdings. So, in two clicks a patron moves from twitter to the catalog. See the example below – catalog links start at the bottom.

Twitter analytics with Twitonomy

To get the most out of twitter, it’s important to analyse the impact of your tweets. There are a few different tools for this – twitter for business offers one – but twitonomy is free, easy, and involves a lot of colourful visualizations.

Twitonomy monitors:

• Mentions, retweets, followers & following
• Tweet history, tweets per day
• Hashtags used and how often
• Most retweeted tweets
• Specific keyword searches (i.e. how often “TPL” is tweeted)
• and more.

That’s a very brief whirlwind introduction to twitter. The moral of the story is, a twitter feed can be as simple or complex as you like or have time for, but it has a big payoff. There are currently 500 million twitter users, who make up 32% of all Internet users. If you want some more tips about using twitter, see the twitter cheat sheet.  And please share your twitter best practices in the comments!

Next time we’ll look at Pinterest, and get a sense of the difference between text-based and image-based tools. Is your org using Pinterest? Comment or email me to tell us about your experience.

This content is published under the Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

In the first part of this little OLITA Appetizer, I outlined a very simple step-by-step process how you and your library could use Google Drive to generate dynamic charts on your website. Since I’ve wrote that post, there’s been an exciting new development from Google Drive: now you can host entire webpages – that is, HTML, CSS, and Javascript - from Google alone.

This is the second part, which is, as promised, dedicated to adding Google App Scripting to Google Drive. But it’s not going to be a full tutorial on the matter. It’s more just an introductory exploration at this point.

Here’s the intro from the Google page on the topic…

What is Google Apps Script?

Google Apps Script is a JavaScript cloud scripting language that provides easy ways to automate tasks across Google products and third party services.

With Google Apps Script you can:

• Automate repetitive processes and workflows. Create scripts to automate expense approvals, time-sheet tracking, ticket management, order fulfillment, and much more.
• Link Google products with third party services. A script can send custom emails and a calendar invitation to a list from a MySQL database.
• Create custom spreadsheet functions. Apply customized formatting or do complex analysis on data in Google Spreadsheets.
• Build rich graphical user interfaces and menus. With Google Apps Script, a company could power an internal application for purchasing office supplies, where users could shop via a customized menu interface.

So what does this mean?

Well, a script is a little computer program that is written in a scripting language, like in this case, a modified form of Javascript called Google App Script.  Most internet browsers can understand what to do with Javascript, and now, with Google App Scripting, so do Google products like Google Spreadsheet and Google Documents.

The scripts can be stand alone programs that are hosted in Google Drive. Google provides this “Building Your First Script” tutorial that outlines the steps involved in writing a script that creates a new Google Document that reads, “Hello World.”

Google App Scripts can also be embedded into Google Spreadsheets. You may not have noticed, but if you look in the Tools menu of a Google Spreadsheet, you will see that you have access to the Script Gallery (for finding and copying existing scripts made by others for public use and reworking) and the Script Editor, for your own hacking:

Margaret Heller has made a great tutorial for ACRL’s TechConnect on how to create a Google Forms in order to make a simple library workshop registration form and then add Google App Scripting in order to send a confirmation email to those who fill out the form. Her tutorial is based on a more complex tutorial on how to create a variety of workflow task associated with running a Help Desk for a small company.

When I was looking at the variety of Google App Scripts out there I found a number that caught my eye as being potentially useful in the day to day library workflow like this Google App code that compares the values of two columns and creates a third list of items that are unique to the first list.  The tutorial that I ended using first was this one: Automate Google Analytics Reporting using Google Apps Script. Now, everyone can see what the top 100 pages are on the Leddy Library Website over the last 28 days. From such simple information, we at the library to glean both a larger understanding of our how our digital site is used and can also glean also smaller trends such as which promotional campaigns and blog posts are currently resonant with our campus.

I’m curious whether libraries will embrace Google App Scripting and learn to share useful code to use and re-use for our common workflows (a many-to-many ISBN checker would be nice have *hint* *hint*).  And when I see presentations like this one on using Google Refine to  standardizing the names of cities of publication for books (260|a field) in a large set of catalogue records, I am hopeful that this just might be the start of a new way to use and share library tools in common for the commons.

This content is published under the Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

As I wrote about in the introductory post of this set of OLITA Appetizers, Google Drive (once called Google Docs) is a collection of tools that allow people to co-write and share documents, spreadsheets, and presentations.  All you need is an account with Google and you have free access to these programs.

What is sometimes forgotten is that you don’t need an account with Google to view works that have been designated as public in Google Drive.

Here’s a Google Spreadsheet that I have made public. It’s a simple table of the gate counts of the Leddy Library, University of Windsor, from 1999-2012 and a “chart” made from said table.

Tah-dah! And with that I have made my chart available using a cloud-served platform for distributed data-driven analysis, engagement, and yaddayaddayadda.  And you can too!

After you create a document or spreadsheet in Google Drive, you can set the document’s visibility to public by clicking on the large blue “Share” button in the top right of the screen. [Google provides this help guide to the visibility features in Drive.] You can also designate a trustworthy individual the ability to edit and maintain your spreadsheet on your behalf:

While this set up technically gets the job done, it’s not exactly aesthetically pleasing nor is it generally desirable to send your readers to another site just to look at a graph.  And the good news is that you don’t have to that; you can publish your chart separately from your data and embed it into a document or web page of your own:

After you “publish” your chart, Google Spreadsheet will give you a long Javascript   passage that you can embed into a webpage to generate either a static image or an “interactive chart” : a graph that refreshes itself every hour or so.

Do you what this means? YOU DON’T HAVE TO MAKE BRAND NEW CHARTS EVERY TIME YOU NEED TO AN ANNUAL REPORT. Just add to your table of data and all of your related embedded graphs will refresh with the new info.  Huzzah!

The Leddy Library website runs on Drupal and we were able to embed interactive charts in our pages using the “PHP code” text format option.

But for those of us who don’t have access to a web server, there is another option from Google that you might want to explore. Google Sites is a service that allows Google users to create their own websites and wikis from scratch or from templates. The Google Sites promotional video is below:

We can use Google Sites to embed our charts. And in this example, we are going to be a little bit more private and only want to publish our chart in a limited way.

First, we are going to set the visibility of our chart to “Anyone with link”

Then we  can insert the chart into a Google Site for publicly sharing your chart but not your raw data.

Now, while you can separate your data from your charts, I would urge you to not to. Whenever possible, please make your data sets readily available for re-use.

Why? Well, Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, has asked us to. He makes a compelling case why we need raw data now [video, 16 minutes] and has shown us already just a small sample of what open, linked data may bring to the world [video, 5 minutes].

In order to encourage all of us to create a World Wide Web of not just texts, documents and videos, but of data as well, Tim Berners-Lee has suggested of thinking of the work as a continuum of effort that should be recognized and rewarded. And so, he developed a five-star scale for Open Data efforts which I have I’ve included but modified slightly below:

★ make your data available on the web (whatever format)
★★ make it available as structured data (e.g. Excel instead of an image or PDF)
★★★ non-proprietary format (e.g. .csv aka comma delimited instead of Excel)
★★★★ use URLs to identify things, so that people can point at your stuff
★★★★★ link your data to other people’s data to provide context

When you make your spreadsheets public in Google Drive, you allow your readers the ability to copy the data in a variety of formats including .csv, Excel, and PDF as they may choose.  By doing so you get three gold stars!

If you have been inspired to make some of your library data available in an open format or if your library like the Edmonton Public Library has already done so please let us know in the comments! You deserve kudos! And we give them to you!

Next time: we’ll see what can happen when you add Google App Scripts to Google Drive. See you then

This content is published under the Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

As someone who collaborates with other people across the city and across the province, I am a big fan of Google Drive’s ability to co-write and share documents.

Google Drive is the new name of what was once called Google Docs. I’m still getting used to the name-change which happened last year. I still don’t like the name but I think I now understand why they made the change.

Google is trying to get across to us two things: Google Drive is like Dropbox : a place where you can store and access your files from wherever you are and whatever device you are using. And, Drive is also a verb: you can use Google Drive to, errr, drive functionality to and from other applications.

How? Well, that’s what this short OLITA Appetizer series is going to be all about!

After we get the introductions out of the way, our next post will be dedicated to showing how easy it is for you to embed graphs, tables and charts from a Google Spreadsheet into a website and in doing so, create a dynamic “dashboard” of statistics. And, as an additional bonus, you can find out how easy it is to earn yourself 3 Stars from Tim-Berners Lee, inventor of the Internet.

The next post after that will be dedicated to doing the same but with this time with an addition of Google Apps Script. I don’t want to get ahead of myself, but as this post is about introductions and disambiguations, it’s as good as time as any to you let you know that Google Apps Script is very different from Google Apps.

Google Apps is a set of Google run-applications such Gmail, Google Calendar that are branded for a particular business or educational institution.

Google Apps Script, on the other hand is “a JavaScript cloud scripting language that provides easy ways to automate tasks across Google products and third party services”.

It seems to me that not many people know about Google Apps Script, which is too bad, because from my brief experiences with it, I believe that it has the potential to do a lot of amazing things. And I think Google Drive and Google Apps Script is especially relevant for libraries because you don’t need access to a web server (read “ask permission from your IT department” ) in order to make available dynamic and responsive services and content for others

See you next week!

This content is published under the Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.