Social–enabled Library Websites? The Post-It Note Concept

I pitched an idea last week that didn’t meet resistance, but didn’t have a big bandwagon either. Here is the gist of the story.

Last year when we did the Exam Cram one of the things that we wished we had was an online message board so that students could form their own study groups, share notes, etc. We compromised with a whiteboard solution.

Presently we have a big push to gather student feedback for a small renovation we’re planning. There are several metrics that we’re using, but I really want to also offer an anonymous forum style message board so that we can ask questions and get feedback about furniture, layout, design, function, etc.

This led me to think about a wider need for social interactions throughout our entire website. NCSU has a nice forum which they embed on their Commons site. I’d like to take it a step further and embed “talk” pages throughout a larger portion of the library site. Here is a conceptual drawing:

Basically you take your mega forum, which works like all other message boards with threaded conversations all on one page—but then also embeds select threads or topics onto appropriate web pages. Students have questions about the equipment we rent out, here is a way they can post questions, get answers, see what others have said, etc. Or what about printing or events or workshops? Everything would be more social and at least there will be an offer of interaction.

Another example: With a recent environmental display in the library, a student used a post-it note to comment about the information on the wall. We took it down, but this type of interaction would be ideal for a message board environment because individuals could have a dialogue about the display materials and it could result in a larger community discussion.

Yeah, I know there are issues with “appropriateness” and “security” and “identity” and “moderation”—that’s all to be worked out over the summer, but I think the concept is worth a shot. Imagine a pile of post it notes neatly arranged in a digital format expressing opinions and feedback relevant to the web page they are viewing… we’ll see what happens.

Comments

[Meredith]

I've been thinking about almost the same thing. I'm looking for new ways for our distance learners to easily provide feedback and ask questions in a more public forum so they could benefit from the answers we give to others. I'm embedded in some of their WebCT classrooms and I find that a librarian discussion board in a single classroom doesn't really encourage conversation and it takes way too much of my time to check 14 classrooms every day (WebCT seriously needs discussion board RSS feeds!). That model might work for some libraries, but it really hasn't worked at ours.

I'm still thinking about the best way to implement this, and it will probably be part of a larger redesign of the library web presence for our distance learners that I'm taking on this summer (hopefully). I'm thinking about using Drupal, which has forum functionality. Your idea for embedding talk pages throughout the site gives me something more to think about. Thanks for the post!

[Mark K.]

Of possible interest on the topic of feedback:

"Visitor Voices Book Club: Talking Back" at Museum 2.0
http://museumtwo.blogspot.com/2007_10_01_archive.html