Hall, Hazel (2011) Relationship and role transformations in social media environments. The Electronic Library, 29 (4). ISSN 0264-0473
Restricted to Registered users only
Available under License Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial.
Download (405kB) | Request a copy
Based on a keynote paper presented at Internet Librarian International 2010 this article argues that the way in which librarians conceive a number of relationships – between themselves, social media tools, and end-users – determines the boundaries of service innovation. The discussion is set against a context that considers how social media currently provide additional platforms for traditional information services delivery, the characteristics that social media share with other technological implementations, and the corresponding challenges that these present. It is argued that the sophisticated deployment of social media exhibited by librarians in their personal professional use of tools is yet to be extended into mainstream services to end-users. Moreover, the potential of social media as a platform for collaborative working where end-users and librarians develop services together remains to be exploited. This work draws on recent research on collaboration in online environments completed at Edinburgh Napier University. The perspective is that of a researcher with a background in information services provision, who is also a regular consumer of information delivered over social media platforms. The social media implementation at the UK Library and Information Science Research Coalition (http://lisresearch.org) is deployed to illustrate points made in the discussion.
|Uncontrolled Keywords:||Communities; Information sharing; knowledge management; library and information science; social informatics;|
|University Divisions/Research Centres:||Edinburgh Napier University, Institute for Informatics and Digital Innovation|
|Dewey Decimal Subjects:||300 Social sciences > 300 Social sciences, sociology & anthropology > 302 Social interaction|
|Library of Congress Subjects:||H Social Sciences > HN Social history and conditions. Social problems. Social reform|
|Depositing User:||Computing Research|
|Date Deposited:||31 May 2011 11:47|
|Last Modified:||31 May 2011 11:47|
Actions (login required)