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This OCLC membership report explores this web of social participation and cooperation on the Internet and how it may impact the library’s role, including: The use of social networking, social media, commercial and library services on the Web How and what users and librarians share on the Web and their attitudes toward related privacy issues Opinions on privacy online Libraries’ current and future roles in social networking

The social networking site Facebook has become an inescapable phenomenon for college students, but little systematic research has studied why these students use Facebook. I conducted an online survey among Facebook users at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (N=1,049) to examine why they use Facebook and how it fulfills their needs. The most prevalent use of Facebook was as a social activity – students reported using Facebook with friends to view and discuss other people’s profiles. Essentially, Facebook appears to operate primarily as a tool for the facilitation of gossip.

Connotea [1] is a free online reference management and social bookmarking service for scientists created by Nature Publishing Group [2]. While somewhat experimental in nature, Connotea already has a large and growing number of users, and is a real, fully functioning service [3]. The label 'experimental' is not meant to imply that the service is any way ephemeral or esoteric, rather that the concept of social bookmarking itself and the application of that concept to reference management are both recent developments. Connotea is under active development, and we are still in the process of discovering how people will use it. In addition to Connotea being a free and public service, the core code is freely available under an open source license [4].

This session will describe the work that BiblioCommons has been undertaking to explore implementation models for Social Discovery Systems in library environments, with seed funding form three Canadian Provinces.

Get acquainted with Twitter, a social networking application that is finding traction in the online communication world.

If we believe all the hype and rhetoric then we are essentially Information & Knowledge Professionals [1]in an Information & Knowledge Society[2] with an Information & Knowledge Economy [3]during the formative years of the Information & Knowledge age[4].

This manifesto is intended to propose that we do just that; that as students, faculty and staff we transform SLIS and create the kind of utopian digital learning organization that we all supposedly advocate. Let us apply the Web 2.0, Library 2.0, social networking, knowledge management principles that we are all in training to implement in society at large. Let us engage in the manifestation of a vision we all allegedly maintain:

The New Web has brought with it some amazing tools for creating online subject guides. These tools offer the addition of multimedia and multi-format elements such as photos, videos, social bookmarks, RSS feeds, and widgets to traditional resource guides, as well as an interactive dimension which makes them particularly 2.0. Here are a few tools for creating your own 2.0 guides.

Folksonomies, or user-created taxonomies, are currently used as collaborative tools to describe images, films, hyperlinks, and other objects and documents. LibraryThing is a website that lets users catalog their own book collections through the use of Library of Congress Subject Headings and social tagging. This paper records the results of exploratory research focusing on the connection between folksonomies and controlled vocabulary and utilizing LibraryThing as a possible benchmark to measure tagging’s efficacy and accuracy as an instrument for subject analysis.

On this episode of Interviews with Innovators, Jon Udell's guest is Beth Jefferson, the founder of BiblioCommons. Her company's new software aims to transform public libraries' online catalogs into environments for social discovery of resources that are cataloged not only by librarians, but also by patrons.

In January 2007, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) announced its second multi–year technology grant program for America’s public libraries. The purpose of Phase II, Keeping communities connected: The next step is to help public libraries sustain the public access computing infrastructure laid down during Phase I. Now, as then, the goal of the program is to bridge the digital divide. But it is a digital divide as defined by Bill Gates and not the public library community. Situating Gates’ philanthropy within a critical policy frame, this paper considers two alternatives to Gates’ problem definition of the digital divide, and how knowledge of these might benefit those communities served by public access computing (PAC) services as found in public libraries. The two specific alternatives considered come from the Free Software Foundation (FSF), and Community Informatics (CI). Significantly, both social movements promote the potential of free and open software as an important part of any solution. Finally, the public library literature is reviewed for patterns in the community’s use of FOSS, and the argument is made for its use in the delivery of PAC services.

Now social bookmarking and tagging tools help librarians bridge the gap between the library's need to offer authoritative, well-organized information and their patrons' web experience.

Three new conditions, or clusters of conditions, have emerged—social, technological, and theoretical—and their convergence suggests a new kind of "core" for the liberal arts.

This article posits a definition and theory for "Library 2.0". It suggests that recent thinking describing the changing Web as "Web 2.0" will have substantial implications for libraries, and recognizes that while these implications keep very close to the history and mission of libraries, they still necessitate a new paradigm for librarianship. The paper applies the theory and definition to the practice of librarianship, specifically addressing how Web 2.0 technologies such as synchronous messaging and streaming media, blogs, wikis, social networks, tagging, RSS feeds, and mashups might intimate changes in how libraries provide access to their collections and user support for that access.