I M Reference
I spoke with a librarian from the Livermore Public Library in California about the IM Reference that they had implemented just six short months ago. The librarian (I have to stop myself from referring the librarian as she because I have no idea the gender of the person I spoke with and caught myself assuming) surprised me by telling me that the staff had the idea to have Online Reference instead of it coming from the top down. One of the librarians recommended it and the administration ran with it.
So far, the new feature is working well, the librarian mentioned that, although it does not bring new patrons into the physical library, it has made those people bound by health concerns, time, or distance able to access the library and she/he believes that more people have recognized the library when they otherwise wouldn’t have.
Most of the time, whoever is answering the IM Reference also has to answer questions from the phone and in person, which can get hectic but has been manageable so far. There has also been some pranking but nothing as serious as harassment.
All in all, I had a very pleasant experience with the IM Reference at Livermore. My first comment was answered within the minute and the librarian was very prompt and polite. As they are only six months in, we can’t know the long term effects, but it seems this new feature is off to a good start with lots of support behind it.
Dr Jekyll and hydeluvstrbl99
I was a teenager when I had my first experience with social networking so I was more interested in how to cause trouble than how to “connect with my community”. Like Nicole mentioned in her blog, I found an AOL screenname. My mom helped me create my first one, just part of my name; and then I got a different ‘cooler’ one with my friends so I could do the sneaky stuff. Then we set to work lurking in inappropriate chatrooms or searching for our crushes on-line.
The interesting thing about chat-rooms, email, and, more recently, the explosion of social networking sites is what different people we all become. When I was fifteen, I wasn’t shy, but I wasn’t going out of my way to cause reactions from people and I wasn’t a spiteful or rebellious child, I don’t think. Neither were my friends. Yet online, in these chatrooms, we would lie, say rude things or provacative things (this is before internet predator was a phrase) just to see what the person on the other end would say. I remember trying to convince some boy in a sports chatroom that claimed he was fifteen and claimed he lived in Texas that my friend and I were Troy Aikman’s secret illegitimate twin daughters for like four hours. We created a different identity to contact a popular boy and try to get dirt about who he liked. This was the kind of mischief we would have never dreamed about carrying out in person.
As I got older, I had friends who were dumped by email or who had huge blowout fights with other friends over IM. What is it about typing that made us say things we wouldn’t utter in the flesh? Perhaps it was not having to be face to face with the person or maybe the time delay urged us to overthink our friend’s comments. Maybe we just weren’t used to seeing what we said to each other in print and we didn’t know how to take it. It could have been the newness of being able to create an image of yourself that less people could see through. Maybe, still, it was the friends sitting around us egging us on and telling us what to say next to the boy in our Yearbook Class or the girl we thought may have glared at us at lunch. I wish there was a Wonder Years episode that discussed virtual community so that Kevin Arnold’s older voice could tell me what it all meant. And yet, maybe the mystery of our virtual vs. actual identities is one that even a Daniel Stern voiceover couldn’t wrap up in 23 minutes.
