Reflections on ‘Sharing made simple’

I attended the CyMAL Sharing Made Simple event on Wednesday at University of Wales, Newport. The event was delivered by Brian Kelly of UKOLN – Brian gave a comprehensive overview of Web 2.0 technologies and facilitated group discussions on the opportunities and barriers to introducing Web 2.0 into library, museum and archive services. Brian has also created some very good and very simple hands-on guides to adopting a range of Web 2.0 tools.

There were also a couple of case studies – Paul Bevan from the National Library of Wales gave a very interesting talk about the NLW’s moves to make its collections more accessible through wikipedia and other Web 2.0 technologies. I spoke about our Library 2.0 in FE project and in particular I plugged the Library web quest we have developed to train staff in the use of Web 2.0 tools.

There was a lot of enthusiasm towards adopting Web 2.0 tools and a range of Web 2.0 initiatives were identified as ‘low hanging fruit’ that could be introduced quickly without too much difficulty such as the use of blogs to promote services, creating a presence on social networking sites, social bookmarking to create reading lists, creating/using RSS feeds and even setting up Web 2.0 services such as a Instant Messaging reference service.

The main barrier (other than the standard issues of staff time, cost and software selection) was seen as organisational resistance in terms of issues around ownership, support and control of what would be seen as an offical, but externally hosted, web presence.

The event will be repeated at Bangor University on 24 September and is free to library staff in Wales.