Collaborative Tools in Libraries

Major Collaborative Tools

• Blogs

• RSS

• Wikis

• Social Bookmarking

• Social Networking Software

• Peer-to-Peer Networks

Specific Blog Posts, Articles, and Presentations on Collaborative Tools

• Social Machines by Wade Roush in Technology Review August 2005

• 5 More Notable Social Networking Sites by Robert J. Lackie at the Library Garden blog September 2006

Online Surveys

• Step by step guide to making your first online survey using SurveyMonkey (PDF version) by Cindy Boeke. PPT version: Step by step guide to making your first online survey using SurveyMonkey (Click on the link).
• FLICC-FEDLINK Surveys: Analysis and documentation of an online user feedback survey for the Library of Congress's FLICC-FEDLINK division, containing 484 responses. The wiki includes findings, documentation, survey data, and other information, including a 50-page report (PDF) and "Collaborative Surveys - Using Feedback from Stakeholders to Build New Services"(PPT) by Cindy Boeke and others.

Specific Projects using Collaborative Tools

• ANTS: ANimated Tutorial Sharing project by COPPUL This project was designed to enable librarians to share in the development of point-of-need animated tutorials for a multitude of e-products. The project makes use of new Collaborative Information Technology (CIT) via an Open Source Institutional Repository (DSpace), a Wiki, RSS Feeds and Web Pages. This enables participants to (1) identify tutorials for development and (2) keep others up to date on their work. Initially only COPPUL librarians could add content to the Repository; but as of October 2006, any librarian can add content as well as download open source tutorials. It should also be noted that as its list of e-resources for tutorial development is on a Wiki, the list is considered to be a starting point for development. Anyone can add new e-products to the list of tutorials for development. Similarly, other types of library tutorials are welcome. One need only indicate that it exsists on the wiki and ensure that the source code for the tutorial is uploaded into DSpace.

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