A Brick Wall
May 4th, 2006The Green and Gray Librarian presented on RSS, Blogs, and Wikis to her colleagues at work (She used PBWIKI!!!) and received a luke warm repsonse:
“I think the presentation was mostly me talking to the walls. I know a few members of the staff were interested, but I think the rest will simply dismiss it as useless information. I don’t know what to do about this attitude. I feel as though we are missing opportunities to bill ourselves as the “information professionals” on campus. Why aren’t we out there showing faculty how to use RSS to stay on top of developments in their fields? Instead of using a blog or some other medium to encourage the use of critical thinking skills related to topics such as Google Scholar and the use of Wikipedia for academic work, we sit in the library and complain about students this and students that. We get less than 20 reference questions a day at the reference desk, but we refuse to offer reference via IM or to participate in the consortial virtual reference service.”
The comments after the post are dead on so check those out as well. The bottom line is that you can lead librarians to blogs, wikis, etc, but you can’t force them to learn this stuff. They have to want to learn. But you can:
1) Make the presentation as exciting and entertaining as possible, grab their attention, and suck them in.
2) Make the topic relevent to them and their daily work
3) Ask them questions during the presentation.
4) Listen to what they have to say, even if it’s negative.