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Best Practice for Library Programing Collaboration

http://love2read2012.wordpress.com

NSW Readers Advisory Working Group

Twitter Reading Group

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what are you reading?

There will be a live twitter discussion on Tuesday 31 July starting at 8.00pm Australian Eastern Standard Time. Use the tag #NYR12 as you discuss your discover reading.

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Why a Twitter Reading Group?

It helps library staff

LEARN new skills
UNDERSTAND and USE social media
DEVELOP expected skills sets

and it

EXTENDS the services of public libraries - is free and accessible to everyone
is COLLABORATIVE

http://readersadvisory.wetpaint.com/

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More Background...

The twitter reading group is

run by the NSW Readers Advisory Working group

http://readersadvisory.wetpaint.com/

won the 2011 Marketing Award for New South Wales Public Libraries in the social media category.

http://goodreadingmagazine.com.au/magazine.cfm?issue=138

The NSW RA group formed in 2005 and comprises NSW library workers who provide RA services in their libraries. The aim of the group is to promote both the enjoyment of reading and their public library collections. Members are spread over the state, involvement is in addition to paid work. Consultation and collaboration is paramount. The twitter reading group has developed as an extension of the working group's aims, and in its' second year, serves as a way of raising the profile of professional library skills online as well as encouraging the ongoing development of readers advisory skills.

The marketing award was judged on innovation, impact on the community, extent of collaboration and standard of design. It was the first time a NSW Public Libraries marketing award was won by a collaborative group of library staff rather than an individual library service.

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Value of Collaboration

For organisers:

Supportive environment
Learn as you work and share skills
Suits variable workloads
Works over geographical distance

For all Library staff:

Learning new technologies
Provides set of resources to build upon

We wanted to share with you how we run the twitter reading group, and why collaboration works for us. But by showing your how we work together and our collaborative toolkit, we hope that you will also be inspired to try some of these tools for your own collaborative projects. I'm sure some were used for the organisation of this conference.

Collaboration encourages staff to work together and learn new skills in a supportive environment - staff participate according to their comfort levels and learn new skills as comfort levels grow

A collaborative model allows participants to vary the amount of time they put into a project, depending on the rest of their workload

Because we are a group of professionals who are based all over NSW, from Coffs Harbour, to Bowral to Wagga Wagga, it is essential that all members of the steering committee can access up to date work on the project in real time.

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The Collaborative Toolkit

Readers Advisory Working Group Wiki

http://readersadvisory.wetpaint.com

Skype

Face to Face Meetings

Google Docs

Wordpress Dashboard

Hootsuite and Tweetdeck

A number of tools are used to plan the twitter reading group. These tools are a mix of online and face to face and are all collaborative and shared, so that many people can contribute ideas. These tools allow for open discussion and decision making and allow the organisers to reach out to a many public library staff and potential partners as possible. We feel that the more people who are involved and feel a sense of ownership of the project, the more successful it will be.

A lot of our tools are particularly useful because they allow equal access to all work, despite geographical distance. Because we all work on the front lines helping customers for part of each day, we can't always pick up the phone to check where someone is up to, and because we are all often working together on the same piece of the project, even if we got someone on the phone they might not know the whole story.

Having access to the same tools makes all content creation a group process.

Thankfully tools like Google Docs and the ability to save and schedule blog posts on Wordpress mean that we can all see exactly where we are up to and how much work there is left to do. The ability to write a blog post in advance and schedule it for a future date is indespensible, as is the ability to link wordpress with twitter, automating a large portion of the process of promoting each monthly theme and getting them out there to the wider public library network and our reading communities.

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Sharing Works Best...

'Open Data' approach to content

Toolkit of themes and ideas

Busy library staff don't have to create new content, but can claim as their own

Libraries can be flexible in how they use themes in their community

http://love2read2012.wordpress.com/

Why is this awesome for Public Library Staff and how can you be involved with the collaboration

sharing without having to create the content - Jenn, Helen and Ellen

While the reading group blog is the public face of the program and a the landing site for associated twitter activity, it also contains a collection of themed resources and ideas for libraries and other organisations to adapt and use for any or all of the following - library websites, other blogs, twitter, flickr, facebook, reading groups, reading displays and booklists. In this way, the blog serves as a promotional toolkit offered to all public library staff. It is up to each individual library to choose how they wish to use these resources. It is not considered important who came up with an idea, what matters is how that idea is used. All public library staff are encouraged to take the ideas collected on the blog and make them their own. An ‘open data’ approach to content created provides libraries with a valuable resource to build upon, and the fundamentals of the reading group can be promoted by any library as if they were the originators of all ideas.

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http://twitter.com/#!/search?q=%23nyr12

search for hashtags on twitter...

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http://love2read2012.wordpress.com/

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http://readwatchplay.wordpress.com/

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NSW Readers Advisory Wiki

http://readersadvisory.wetpaint.com/

2012 - Love2Read

http://love2read2012.wordpress.com/

2013 and beyond: Read Watch Play

http://readwatchplay.wordpress.com/

twitter: #NYR12 and #rwpchat

http://twitter.com/#!/search-home

http://twitter.com/readwatchplay