The aim of the 23 Things Summer Camp strategy sessions was to encourage attendees to think about the point of social media and how it might be used to greatest effect in their libraries.

A good part of each session was spent working through a process of identifying social media requirements, including audiences, content requirements and functionality. This information was then plotted in a grid against a variety of popular social media tools to help clarify which might be most useful for each library.

The old fashioned approach of pen and large pieces of paper was used and resulted in some great stuff. Examples below:

I promised attendees at the first Synchronisation session of the Summer Camp yesterday that I would post my presentation here for them.  If you are due to attend the next Synchronisation session on 26th August, you may want to look away now to avoid spoilering yourself!

This post provides you with guidance on how to link your various web 2.0 sites and services together so that they update each other automatically and display their content on your other web sites.   Click on any of the 'how do I...?'s below for instructions.  There are a lot of potential ways that you can link sites, and usually a variety of ways in which you can do so. Before you start, think carefully about which sites you have and how and why you want to link them, and be prepared to experiment if something doesn't work!

Note for readers of this blog who are not attending the Summer Camp session: these are rough guides to get you started, and are not comprehensive. Once you get the hang of linking things together, you'll find that they all function in one of a few ways - using an RSS feed, a widget, or a third-party application. 

LibraryThing was not covered in Oxford's original "23 Things"programme. However, there will be opportunities to work on LibraryThing during the Summer Camp.

What is LibraryThing?

LibraryThing is a social cataloguing tool. It allows you to create a catalogue of books within LibraryThing and to share reviews, ratings and tags with other LibraryThing users.

You can use LibraryThing to catalogue and share information about your personal collection of books or you can start an institutional account to share your Library collections. Some Libraries have added their whole collection to LibraryThing whereas others have just added particular collections or their recent accessions.

LibraryThing allows institutions to add 200 books for free: and you can delete books and add more as you go along, so if you only want to use LibraryThing for accessions you could get away with a free account. If you want to add more you will have to pay a yearly subscription of $10 which will allow you to add 5000 titles with the option of seeking permission to go up to 10,000 titles. See "Organizational Account" on LibraryThing" for more information.

Some advantages of using LibraryThing as a Library:

• Provides an alternative way to promote your new accessions or collections using a attractive interface with social features
• Readers can explore your books on LibraryThing in a variety of ways including browsing by tags, author, title and date
• LibraryThing generates an RSS feed of newly added titles so your readers can keep up to date with new items
• LibraryThing widgets allow you to display newly added titles on your web page, blog, Facebook and other social media sites
• Your readers can benefit from tags, reviews and recommendations added by you or other members of LibraryThing
• You can set up special interest groups to discuss and share information about books. For example Linacre College Library set up a book club on LibraryThing

To find out how Oxford Libraries are using LibraryThing look check out the "Oxford Case Studies" section of the Oxford Libraries web 2.0 wiki.

What is LibraryThing for Libraries?

Confusinging LibraryThing for Libraries has nothing to do with putting your Library Collections on to LibraryThing.

Librarything for Libraries is a venture that allows Libraries to pull social data such as tags and reviews from LibraryThing into their OPAC. THe SOLO+ team is currently considering using some elements of LibraryThing for Libraries in the future - this is not covered in this post.

Setting up LibraryThing

1. Go to http: //www.librarything.com and choose "Join Now". The sign up procedure is quite simple - choose "Institutional" for a Library account.
   
2. Your users will be able to access two pages: your profile page and your catalogue pag

Profile

Your profile page includes all the usual information (email addresses, "about me", "about my library" etc). When you are setting up your profile, look out for the links on the right (easy to miss) which allow you to:

• Add pictures
• Change account settings e.g. to allow/disallow comments, make your library private, allow/disallow LibraryThing to pass your reviews to commercial/non-commercial ventures
• Define options for how your public catalogue page displays by default (e.g. what information is included and how it is displayed). This is under "Display styles" (and can also be controlled from "My Books")
• Set up connections to other web 2.0 services such as Twitter and FaceBooks. This is under "Site/Apps"

Adding Books

1. Choose the "Add Books" tab.
2. You can add books individually or you can "import books" as a batch (which is probably more convenient for most libraries)

Adding books individually

1. LibraryThing is set up to search for books on Amazon and a number of Library catalogues. Once you have found the appropriate book you can add it to your own LibraryThing catalogue and edit the record, add tags, reviews and other information. By default LibraryThing searches Amazon but you may wish to change this. If you want to search OLIS click "choose from 690 other sources around the World" and then browse by country. OLIS is under Oxford University.
   
2. Enter a title, author or ISBN to search. Note: Author / title searching on OLIS from LibraryThing is very slow and OLIS may time out before it returns any results. If you have problems choose Amazon or Library of Congress instead.
   
3. Select the correct record from the results on the right
   
4. Choose "edit book" if you want to make amendments to the record (or alternatively if you just want to add tags or review click "quick edit")

What if I can't find the book? If you can't find a book on any of the catalogues available (Amazon, Library of Congrees, OLIS etc) you can add it manually. Choose "Add the Book Manually" at the bottom of the screen

Importing books as a batch

1. Choose "Import books" (there's a link at the bottom of the "Add Books" page).
2. Paste the ISBNs of the titles you want to add into the third box down. If you want to add your recent accessions, you can ask the OLIS team to include the 020 field in your weekly report. You are likely to get some duplicates but its easy to remove these once the items are in LibraryThing.

Other things to do:

• Choose "Widgets" (home page - top right) to get LibraryThing widgets. Note: these are also often available from within other web 2.0 apps


• Set up a "Group" for discussion

In the 23 Things programme we looked at the blogging tool, Blogger. However, there are plenty of alternative blogging tools out there, including Blogger's main competitor Wordpress. Those setting up a library blog may wish to consider Wordpress as an alternative to Blogger.

Wordpress v Blogger

If you Google "Wordpress v Blogger" you'll find pages of comparisons. Here are just a few of the issues that are discussed:

1. Themes. Themes control the appearance of your blog including the layout, fonts, colour and default banner at the top of the page. Wordpress is praised for having a large number of attractive themes for you to choose from. However, although some of these allow you to change the banner graphic for free, most of them charge for any futher customisation. Although the amounts involved are small this is an irritation.

Blogger is reputed to have fewer themes but they are fully and freely customisable.

2. Ease of use / Functionlity - Blogger is reputed to be easier to use than Wordpress, but Wordpress offers more functionality.

3. Each tool supports a different range of widgets - if you want to include a particular widget, check that the blogging tool you choose supports it before you get started.

To find out more Google "Blogger v Wordpress".

Setting up your Blog

You'll find instruction on Blogger in Thing 3. Here are some instructions for Wordpress

Setting up your Wordpress Blog

1. Go to http://wordpress.com/ and choose sign up.

2. Once you've filled in your details you can choose "gimme a blog" or "just a username, please" You need a blog - don't worry that Blogger creates a blog title which is based on your username, you can change it later.

3. Choose a domain for your blog. This is the bit of the URL which goes before .wordpress.com (e.g. http://lawbod.wordpress.com/). Since its part of the URL try to choose something quite short and avoid capitals and complicated punctuation. This is particularly important if you want to include the URL in your printed materials.

4. Choose a title for your blog - don't worry you can change this later if you think of something better.

5. You'll then need to activate your new account by checking your email.

The Wordpress Dashboard

"My Dashboard" is the consule for almost everything that you'll want to do in Wordpress. Use it to:

• Choose themes
• Choose widgets
• Write, edit and delete posts
• Manage comments
• Add authors/editors
• Check statistics

The only functions that are not available from the dashboard are changing your username, password, email and profile ("About Me") etc. To control these choose "My account"

Themes

To change the "Theme" (layout, default banner, fonts, colours etc) of your blog choose "My Dashboard" followed by "Appearance".

When you choose "Appearance" Wordpress will go straight to the "Themes" menu and from here you can browse the 90 odd themes available or search for something suitable. If you know that you want to use your own banner or background image choose "Feature Filter" which filters the themes so that you only see appropriate options. "Feature filter" is also useful if you know that you want to use a particular layout or colour.

Widgets

To choose some widgets select "My Dashboard" followed by "Appearance" and then choose "Widgets".

Wordpress will present you with a list of widgets on the left of the screen and one or more "Side Bar(s)" on the right which represent the side bar(s) in your blog. To add widgets drag them from the list and drop them on the side bars(s). Every time you do this Wordpress will prompt you to fill in appropriate details for the widget (for example a title or any text that you want to include).
You can drag each widget to the sidebar(s) as many times as you want, so for example, if you want to include two RSS feeds, drag the RSS widget to your sidebar twice.

You can also re-order widgets by dragging and dropping.

Confused by widgets? - they'll be more on widgets in the "synchronisation session".

Posting

To post choose "New Post" from the Wordpress homepage or from "My Dashboard".

The WYSIWYG interface is fairly easy to use and opens a text box with all the usual options in the centre of the screen.

On the right you'll find "Save", "Publish" and "Preview", and beneath these "Categories" and "Tags". Categories are like Blogger labels and allow you to set up broad themes that you are going to cover in your blog. Every time you post you can choose one or more categories for your post. If you'd like your readers to be able to browse your blog by category use the category widget.

In the centre beneath the text box you'll find options for enabling and disabling comments on your post.

I'm reactivating the blog with some information for 23 Things participants (and other interested observers) about next steps if you are interested in taking web 2.0 further in your libraries or across Oxford.  

Web 2.0 Wiki
As you discovered in Thing 17, we have a web 2.0 wiki set up which acts as a repository for information and a forum for sharing experience for Oxford libraries using web 2.0.   If you are inspired to introduce web 2.0 services or use web 2.0 tools in your library, you may find the wiki a useful source of support.   It would also be great if you could update it yourself and let other people know what you're doing and how you're getting on, by adding or updating your library page in the Case Studies section.

Web 2.0 Directory
As well as the wiki, which is primarily staff-focused, there is a directory of libraries' web 2.0 services on the Bodleian Libraries website.   It is maintained by Alison Prince, so please email her to let her know if your library introduces any services so that she can add you on.

Web 2.0 Working Party
This was set up in 2008 to look at the use of web 2.0 in Oxford libraries.   Our next meeting will be in June and will look at where the working party goes now, following the success of 23 Things and hopefully an expansion in web 2.0 services across the libraries.   We're always happy to have new members, and if anyone is keen to get involved, please email me (jane.rawson@bodleian.ox.ac.uk) and I'll get you signed up!