Today I’m posting the first two parts in a four-part series about online community and libraries. These articles will discuss how libraries can build online community within their own online spaces as well as how to venture into new online communities to offer services where their users are.

Part I: Why Community discusses the concept of online community as well as why libraries should be aware and informed about it.
Part II: Building Community looks at ways in which libraries can utilize new Web tools to develop library community spaces online which foster user interaction with library content, staff and other library users.
Part III: Participating in Community will discuss how libraries and librarians can participate in already existing and quickly growing online communities. How to take advantage of Web-based tools such as Flickr, del.icio.us, social networking software, social search, RSS mixers, Answers technology and more to go where our users are.
Part IV: Start Today takes a look at what libraries and librarians can start doing today to work toward furthering online community and libraries.

Online Community and Libraries, Part I: Why Community?

The library has historically been at the center of the community. With the advent of Web 2.0, a massive online community has arisen. Users are gathering online to seek and exchange information as well as to socialize, play, create, and collaborate. What will be the role of libraries and librarians in these new communities? What are libraries doing to build and increase their value to online communities? Can libraries go where their users are and participate in developing knowledge communities? Should libraries care about online community?

Why Community?

The new Web has brought about an explosion of growth in social and community websites. MySpace enjoys over 100 million users, and the Wikipedia has over 4 million articles written in over 200 languages. (5, 4) 73% of adult Americans are online and 84% of all Internet users belong to some sort of online group. (1,2) People are coming together online to connect and cooperate - they are forming communities.

Third Places

Ray Oldenburg in The Great, Good Place talks about the importance and necessity for societal third places. Places which are outside the home and workplace. Third Places are informal public places where people can gather to meet others, have conversations, and feel like a part of the community. They can be considered a home-away-from-home where people can linger in camaraderie. One can count on meeting both regulars and newcomers in such places, and all are welcome. They are inclusive places which admit everyone and bestow equality on their visitors regardless of social status, career success, or background. Third places such as a coffee shop, local pub, or Main Street are at the center of the community. Essential for individual as well as community well-being, these third places offer their congregations a place to socialize, relax, and learn about local events and happenings. (6)

Although more task-focused than Oldenburg’s quintessential third place, libraries share many of the characteristic traits of these informal public places. “The new neighborhood library functions as a kind of community center, a place where people get to know one another, where communities find themselves.” (8) suggests Putnam and Feldstein in Better Together: Restoring the American Community which compares the branch library to the third place. Libraries have always provided their patrons with public meeting places, a free and hospitable environment, and an atmosphere of social equality. Today’s library is also a place to discover neighborhood happenings and to socialize with others. A place where regular library-goers mingle with new patrons as well as librarians. Libraries have begun to open up cafes to further this sense of community and offer their visitors auxiliary spaces for relaxation and conversation. Libraries, in a similar way to third places are hubs of their community.

In this day and age, choices of third places or community centers have become increasingly sparse. Robert Putnam discusses the decline in American “social capital” over the last twenty-five years in his Bowling Alone. He cites a variety of societal changes as culprits such as sprawling urban development and advances in technology. It is these developments which have led to the diminishment of community and social connectedness within our society. Putnam tells us that one countertrend to this pattern of waning social involvement is the Web. “Social capital is about networks, and the Net is the network to end all networks”. (9) He suggests that the Web has the potential to offset the decline in community participation. “No sector of American society will have more influence on the future state of our social capital than the electronic mass media and especially the Internet.” (10)

The Web today is about linking people to people, not just information. It’s about creating connections with other users, it’s social. Internet congregation points have become the new neighborhoods and communities of shared interests create bonds which rival those of shared locality.

Increasingly, people are gathering into what Howard Rheingold referred to as “virtual communities”. In his Virtual Community Rheingold talks about his experiences as a member of the WELL, an online group which formed a thriving community. Rheingold describes virtual communities as gathering places as well as tools for communication and information exchange. They are social spaces in which people seek out not just information, but each other; “I realized that the people who have the information are more interesting than the information alone… I was hungry for intellectual companionship as well as raw information.” (11)

In essence, the Web has become a third place. Online communities are neutral spaces in which people gather to socialize and interact. Both regulars and newbies are welcome to rub virtual shoulders and all find themselves on an even playing field. Akin to Oldenburg’s third place, the online community is inclusive and provides a social equality to its users who are not only leveled according to social and career status, but age and appearance are removed as factors as well. This further expands the possibilities for relationships in these domains. Members discover information about local events from communities such as Craigslist and Meetup.com, as well as a new form of “local” information in online worlds such as Second Life and World of Warcraft. And although many online communities tend to be larger than those found at the corner pub, they are communities nonetheless. “Some aspects of life in a small community have to be abandoned when you move to an online metropolis; the fundamentals of human nature, however, always scale up.” (12).

Increasingly people are spending more time online and in these “virtual communities”, rather than in physical third places offline. According to a Jupiter Research study, online users are now spending as much time online as watching television. The average time spent online is 14 hours per week. (The activity which users have decreased the most due to time spent online is reading books.) (7) New social networking websites combined with increased access to broadband connections which allows them to take part in these communities will only increase the time that users spend online. It has already been projected that membership in online gaming communities, or MMOG-Massively Multiplayer Online Games in the US will increase from the 3.7 million users in 2006 to 9 million by 2011. (3)

Online Community

People are gathering in social spaces and sharing information online. Community is the new nexus for information, and therefore it is exactly where libraries will want to be. We now have the opportunity to connect with patrons in ways we never could in the past. This is an exciting time and one in which libraries can embrace online community and take advantage of all the Web has to offer. By using the tools unique to this medium we can offer our services to users in their own space. Libraries are competing for mindshare with social networks and online communities. By becoming users of Web technology, librarians and information professionals can observe how users interact with and utilize information. This provides us with clues to new ways to present our users with information. Now more than ever, we have the opportunity reach our users where they live.

Online Community and Libraries, Part II: Building Community

Community ecosystems such as MySpace are some of the most trafficked sites on the Web today. And with good reason. They give their users what they want. They provide them with a space for socialization and community as well as tools to excel in content creation. They allow their users to express themselves creatively by customizing their profiles and contributing to the community. They allow them to be themselves and to feel like a part of something worthwhile. We need to keep in mind that there must be a serious value exchange in order to engage users in a social website today. Whether that takes the form of karmic user comments or the ability to contribute reviews, community-oriented websites need to tap into the passion of their users. Users today want to create, not just consume, to write, not just read, and they want to do so in a social forum. After all, what use is writing something which no one else will read? Websites which enable their users to contribute and do so well will capture the limited attention of today’s fastidious user.

Libraries are hubs of their communities, and should remain so in the online space. Now is the time to take advantage of new online tools which facilitate community building by implementing them within the library’s website. Soon, the transfer of traditional library services to the Web will not be adequate enough to sustain the user’s interest. Today’s users are becoming much savvier, and are quickly becoming accustomed to orchestrating their own online experiences.

There are many ways which libraries can implement new Web tools to create social spaces, provide their users with tools and information and empower them to participate in knowledge generation. Not all tools will be valid choices for all libraries and selections must be filtered according to the particular needs of each library.

Community Tools

Blogs
Due to their conversational tone and amateur nature, blogs offer libraries the chance to add a human dimension to their institutions. They provide an opportunity for the library to appear more hip to teen audiences, more fun-loving to a youth demographic, and more patron-oriented to the adult set. Blogs allow libraries to enter into group conversations with their community and learn from them. They open up a dialogue between an organization and its user base. Like many other Web 2.0 tools, blogs are a tool for the ethnographic discovery of the authentic wants and needs of a community. What better way to find out about user needs, than directly from the users?

Wikis
Wikis are websites which everyone can edit quickly and easily and oftentimes without the need to register. They are valuable tools for creating knowledge repositories and allowing user participation. Wikis such as the Princeton Public Library’s Book Lover’s Wiki allow users to collaborate with the library to create a unique resource – in this case a treasure trove of user-contributed book reviews. Wikis have great potential for community-driven cooperative endeavors which encompass niche topics such as: travel information, local heritage, ethnic resources, and other focused themes.

User Profiles
User Profiles are the heart of the community website. They allow the user to create an online identity and point of origin within a site. It is from this starting point that the user can navigate through their personalized content including that which has been created by them alongside that which they have bookmarked. It is also the means by which users discover and connect with other users within the community. User profiles provide an identity investment which bonds the user to the community as well as to the “brand” or organization behind it. User profiles on the library website would provide a suitable interface for personalized functionality. User content such as saved titles, content, friends, recommendations, wish lists, ratings and reviews, personal RSS feeds, as well as reputation information would all be accessible via this starting place.

Tagging
Tagging is a way for users to attach meaningful keywords to content, allowing them to catalog and categorize digital resources. As user-created tags are pooled within the community they create a folksonomy, a naturally occurring classification scheme. The folksonomy reflects the vocabulary and needs of all users as popular tags exist alongside niche or “long tail” ones. In this way the categorization schema is customized for each individual while still serving all of them.

Tagging is a feature of most community websites and would be a welcomed addition to the library’s online catalog and/or website. Tagging could provide users with a complementary system to the library’s traditional taxonomies, one which would reflect their language and information needs directly. The tag cloud, which is a display of the most frequently used tags, is a discovery tool as well as an alternate form of navigation which would enable patrons to browse and discover new resources. The use of such a powerful tool would also offer libraries insight about how their users categorize and organize information. Ex Libris is just one library system vendor which will release an application that will permit tagging. Due out later this year, the Primo product will interface with a library’s ILS to allow user-based tagging and other social features.

User Comments
User Comments enable users to engage in and ignite conversations on the Web. They are a way to interact with digital content directly. Users are making comments on content of all types including blog posts, videos, photos, news stories, and other users. Comments encourage discussions within a community amongst both readers and authors of information. User comments within the library’s catalog would allow users to create brief commentary on library materials in a way similar to the Netflix feature which allows users to contribute their two cents and leave notes for friends concerning video titles. By enabling user comments on the library blog, users are invited to join and initiate group conversations. Library websites which allow comments such as the Ann Arbor District Library encourage users to provide feedback, ask questions, and launch discussions.

User Reviews & Ratings
Ratings are a way for users to rank media or information as well as a wealth of on and offline products. User ratings evaluate everything from news articles and recipes to electronic equipment. Usually represented by a number of shaded stars or a percentage out of ten, ratings are oftentimes averaged for a particular item. User ratings of library resources would be especially informative both to other users and the library itself.

Web users today have a voice, and one way that they make use of it is through the authoring of reviews. Users are creating in-depth reviews of products, services, and media online. Offering the ability to post reviews in the library catalog would empower users and give them a sense of value. It would also allow the library to present its users with a valuable collection of reviews by leveraging the community itself. This type of value exchange is one that Amazon.com has made famous. Primo will also be enabling this type of functionality to libraries later this year. Other ways to enable library patrons to contribute their reviews are through library-created blogs and wikis which allow users to author reviews such as the Monroeville Public Library’s Teen Summer Reading Blog.

Wish Lists
Wish lists consist of items saved by a user which are automatically placed into a list form. Such lists are the premise of websites such as All Consuming and Kaboodle as well as the motivation behind the Netflix Queue. Enabled on a library website, wish lists could be especially powerful, allowing users to save library resources of all formats including books, websites, subject guides, and videos. The social aspects of wish lists come with the user’s ability to share these queues with others.

Friends Lists
The vast majority of community websites today permit users to create a network of friends. Yahoo’s Flickr allows even more granularity, offering users the ability to establish a distinction between family, friends, and contacts. This network provides the user with a personalized set of connections within the community at large. Friends lists in a library website environment would allow patrons to connect with other patrons who possess similar interests, share their wish lists, make user recommendations, and further build community. As users register for accounts with MySpace, they are automatically assigned Tom, a MySpace developer, as their first friend. Libraries could adopt this practice and assign new entrants into the library community a librarian as their first friend.

Top Lists
Top or most popular lists display the information or resources which are currently the most highly favored by the community. They provide a glimpse into the Zeitgeist of a website’s population. Examples of such lists include: Top Read, Most Emailed, Most Commented, Top Authors, and Top Reviewers. Libraries would do well to borrow a page from LibaryThing’s book when it comes to displaying top lists as their Zeitgeist page provides a succinct picture of the preferences of their community. Library top lists could include most popular books, top authors, top websites, top raters and reviewers, and most popular tags. The Arbor District Library offers top lists in their library catalog which include the current “hot items” such as hot books, DVDs, CDs, and books on CD.

Social Bookmarking
Social bookmarking allows users to bookmark websites, or to save their favorites, in an online space. This makes these bookmarks portable instead of limited to the user’s desktop. It also makes them public and social. Users can browse others’ favorites to discover new resources. Social bookmarking in a library community would enable users to not only save website resources, but items from within the library’s catalog. The UPenn library has developed their own bookmarking system called “PennTags”. It is based on the del.icio.us software and it allows users to bookmark and tag websites as well as library cataloging records.

References

1. “Demographic Trends Report”, Pew Internet & Life, http://www.pewinternet.org/trends/
   User_Demo_4.26.06.htm April 26, 2006. Viewed 8/18/06.
2. Fallows, Deborah. “How Women and Men Use the Internet”, Pew Internet & Life, http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/
   PIP_Women_and_Men_online.pdf 12/28/05, p. 32. Viewed 8/21/06.
3. Gartenberg, Michael. “US Massively Multiplayer Games Forecast, 2006 to 2011”, Jupiter Research, May 11, 2006.
4. “List of Wikipedias”, Wikimedia, http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias Viewed 8/21/06.
5. “MySpace” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MySpace Viewed 8/21/06.
6. Oldenburg, Ray. The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community, Avalon Publishing Group, 1999.
7. Parr, Barry. “US Entertainment and Media Consumer Survey”, 2005, Jupiter Research, January 13, 2006.
8. Putnam, Robert D. and Lewis Feldstein. Better Together: Restoring the American Community, Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group, 2004, p.49.
9. Putnam, Robert D. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group, 2001, p. 171.
10. Putnam, Robert D. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group, 2001, p. 410.
11. Rheingold, Howard. Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier, HarperCollins Publishers, 1994. http://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/, Chapter 2.
12. Rheingold, Howard. Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier, HarperCollins Publishers, 1994. http://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/, Introduction.