The library of the McMaster University hosts blogs and wikis for their staff and faculty members. Their reasons for hosting blogs and wikis are these:
"It’s the library’s core mission to provide and manage access to the university’s academic resources and scholarly information. In a world where web technologies are changing the face of scholarly communication and the creation of the scholarly artifact, we feel that providing a platform for faculty to harness new technologies to facilitate their teaching & research makes a lot of sense for the library. It allows us to continue our role as stewards of that scholarly content. In addition, we see our provision of these tools as an extension of our role in upholding and advocating for intellectual and academic freedom."
That sounds good. Especially because its the first noncommercial and nonprofit hoster that I heard of. To develop services for the specific needs of the library's users should be the major goal of all libraries.
The McMaster library acts as a real service provider for if a blog or wiki does not have a feature that staff or faculuty members need, or if the blog or wiki is not behaving in a way that works for them, they can tell the library staff about it!
In future the library wants to add other tools to the 2.0 Toolbox. At the moment, we’re looking into possibly adding a social bookmarking tool. The faculty and staff members are asked to mention other specific technologies that they would like to have.
- Well, in this case the library is a service provider in a new way: putting up 2.0-tools for their faculty members.
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3 comments:
Shane Nackerud started a similar program, called UThink, at the University of Minnesota: http://blog.lib.umn.edu/.
Thanks Anne for mentioning it.
well, I presentated their library portal as an example for a library2.0 - I should have found it by myself ;)
It would be interesting to know who was first. - Are there similar services in Germany, too?
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