In a recent post to The Chronicle of Higher Education's "Wired Campus" blog, Travis Kaya describes how institutions like North Carolina State University and Bates College are creating hubs to track and provide easy access to their impact on sites like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Bates' site also incorporates links to blogs, Wikipedia, and Google Maps, while NCSU has made the software for their Twitter aggregator open source, and thus free to any institution that wants to set up a similar system. From that post:
Bryan Alexander, senior fellow at the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education, said the Bates site is a simple way for colleges and universities to corral information from social media. "So many great technology ideas seem totally obvious when you see them in action," Mr. Alexander said. "It's a very basic, simple idea, but those are often the ones that change the world."
It's an interesting piece, especially as academic librarians debate the merits of their libraries getting more involved in social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. Could these sorts of aggregators increase the viability of that kind of involvement, by linking it to increasingly common library blogs and other library resources? If colleges and universities find value in this sort of technology, how can librarians leverage their tech and information savvy to help make those projects better?
(Oh, and once again I came across a great link via Ellyssa Kroski. If you don't subscribe to her blog, iLibrarian, you really should.)
Comments