LIBR559M: Intrigues
My avatar at the American Library Association in SL
This week my LIBR559M course on social media for information professionals wraps up. We covered, discussed and collaborated on a number of interesting topics during the 6-week period of the course. I’ve listed below the top three parts of the course that I found the most intriguing:
- Affordances – That which an object or system “allows” for a user to do. As someone who is interested in information architecture design, I found this concept useful to consider when analysing a website or a system. Although the concept can be a little difficult to understand at first, we as a class were able to begin to develop the skill of articulating the affordances and constraints when considering the user interface and design of social software.
- Collaboration – For one of our group assignments, our group of five people collaboratively created an online document using wiki software (our completed project is here: http://wiki.ubc.ca/Course:LIBR559M/Social_Media_Instruction). This project was completed online with no in-person meetings. I found this project intriguing. At the beginning I had assumed that we would all write our assigned parts on the wiki. Then, like ants, we would crawl all over each others writing and edit what we had written and then at due date time we would have what we had. It didn’t quite turn out that way. One of the challenges was the wiki software itself, which didn’t really faciiltate discussion well and the formatting was difficult to learn (the markup language was also really annoying and not necessarily intuitive). Lastly, we discovered as a class that we felt more comfortable editing on wikipedia when other editors and writers were anonymous, but in our collaborative setting it was felt that we would need to have some discussion with a classmate before editing his or her work.
- Second Life – Upon exploration of second life, I was left feeling a little disappointed. It seems to me to be a 3-D “container” for creation but not very well used for educational purposes, where the Croquet Project may serve as a better example. The Croquet Project does well with 3-D modeling in architecture and anatomy and can power whiteboard interactivity. I also observed that library-oriented sites, such as the American Library Association, are “flat” representations of real libraries. Information and its delivery are typically flat and I questioned whether or not it could be considered viable in a 3-D environment. An excerpt from my class forum post:
Information searches and retrievals tend to be viewed as “flat” information, & not 3-dimensional. This concept is based on the traditional libraries model. Information that is culled and delivered to patrons is indeed in a “flat” manner. The libraries in SL are representations of this “flat” model, which makes me wonder if we’re ready yet to experience all information in a 3-dimensional format. Will search strings be only the flat/written word , or will it extend itself to verbal search strings (like on Star Trek) as well as textile searches? So my question is whether or not “flat” information currently fits into this 3-D SL model. How will 3-D information flow? And how will information professionals deliver this to us? I think we may be onto something with these virtual environments, but we’re not quite there yet.
Social Network Platforms for Museum Exhibit Designers
London Movie Museum - A Dalek
- “setting their own learning goals
- manage their learning; managing both content and process
- communicate with others in the process of learning”
These platforms make communication and the sharing of information relatively easy for the digital native in his or her specific community. However, some constraints may include:
- requirement of having a membership with the platform/community (as an outsider you may only be able to view the dashboard, but you cannot access it)
- learning curve if the member is a relatively new digital immigrant
- the time committment required to be an active contributing participant
Although I haven’t been a member with a particular Ning community, I personally have participated in membership-based forums and eventually abandoned them due to the time committment involved in composing and responding to posts. It was also due to the shifts in my areas of interest, where the communities were no longer a fit for me.
As I am preparing for a museum 2.0 project, I have come across some interesting social networking sites/platforms that facilitates the peer learning of museum information professionals keenly interested in leveraging social media to create participatory experiences in museums. I found the information on these sites to be quite useful for my project and have since become inspired to seek out and participate in similar communities as a student and as part of my professional development activities.
- http://museum30.ning.com/ - Museum 3.0: What Will the Museum of the Future Look Like? A Ning network, which aggregates blogs as well as Twitter and Flickr feeds to faciltate discussions and information exchanges on the new “museology“. This community has some excellent links to museum blogs and discussions that specialize in topics such as audience analysis and communications strategies.
- http://www.exhibitfiles.org/ - ExhibitFiles: A Community Site for Exhibit Designers and Developers. This particular site, is “in-house” social networking platform, and was developed by the Association of Science – Technology Centres to promote engagement, networking and collaborations among science centres and museums. Each member has a “favourites page” of “Bits and Networks” which has RSS feeds from blogs, Twitter, Flickr and LinkedIn.
Social Search Spaces and Top Engines
At the "Forum" in Norwich
According to Wikipedia, “Social search takes many forms, ranging from simple shared bookmarks or tagging of content with descriptive labels to more sophisticated approaches that combine human intelligence with computer algorithms”, and further describes a social engine as “ a hybrid between a Social Network and a Search Engine.”
The integration of real-time content into Google reflects a trend for information gathering that is being incorporated into specialized social search engines. There are three key affordances associated with real-time content searches:
- Conduct marketing intelligence activities (Elrod Norm 2010)
- Track trending topics (Elrod Norm 2010)
- Discover new sources of grey literature (Farace, Dominic J.; Schöpfel, Joachim 2010)
Danny Sullivan describes “real-time” in social search as new media which is instantaneously published, and combined in with search engine results. He differentiates instant published real-time Twitter and Facebook statuses from real-time publishing in the blogosphere, where a posting isn’t necessarily published right-away. Although there is a trend for “live blogging” at events, many posts involve research and refinement before web publication occurs. Sullivan dubs Twitter the leader of the pack in terms of real-time microblogging platforms, which is reflected in the Google search real-time content. To view such search results in Google, click “latest” on the left-hand side-bar under “Any Time”.
There are 3 notable ways that Google determines what tweets appears on its Search Engine Results Page – SERP (Elrod 2010):
- “Authority, based on the number of followers/retweets the tweeter has”
- “Hotness of topic / clustering of tweets”
- “Semantics, as in it doesn’t look like spam”
With so many items of note on the screen when I do my Google searches, I had failed to note and explore that option on the side-bar. I was therefore, surprised that I could access the latest tweets from Twitter on my search topic.
This discovery brings me to the potential connection between ”grey literature“, and “real-time” search results, which I find intriguing. Information on research topics can sometimes be difficult to search due to the hidden web, and there has been some discussion, if not consensus among researchers that social networking may yield a viable source for grey literature. In their grey literature presentation Yongtao Lin and Marcus Vaska point out that social media such as Twitter and blogs are being used by businesses and politicians, which may act as legitimate forms of information.
The following is a short at-a-glance directory of popular social search space engines that I have compiled for the creation activity for LIBR559M (at Dean Giustini’s suggestion). While I have heard of some of these before, many of the others I hadn’t. These are considered to be popular among the more serious researchers and social media enthusiasts. I enjoyed discovering them:
Blog Search Space Engines
- Google Blogsearch: http://blogsearch.google.com – Allows for advanced blog search in blog titles, post titles and content
- Technorati: http://technorati.com/ – Searches blogs registered with its own service
- Blogpulse: http://blogpulse.com/ - What’s hot in the blog world? Search engine for blog trends
- Ice Rocket Blog Search: http://www.icerocket.com/ - Allows for tracking blogs and blog trends
- blogsearchengine.com: http://www.blogsearchengine.com/ - Indexes the blogosphere (partnered with “Google Custom Search”)
- Amatomu: http://www.amatomu.com/ - Indexes the South African blogsphere
Twitter Search Space Engines
- Twitter Search: http://search.twitter.com – Twitter search engine with its own service
- Twazzup Realtime News: http://www.twazzup.com/ - ” … filters the news out of live internet content”
- Collecta: http://collecta.com/ - Real-time search through Twitter and Facebook statuses
- Twittorati: http://twittorati.com/ - “where the blogosphere and twittersphere meet”. Based on Technorati.com, tracks high-profile bloggers tweets
- Crowdeye.com: http://www.crowdeye.com/home.aspx - Tracks conversations on twitter including retweets and links
- Hashtags.org: http://hashtags.org/ - Tracking system for hashtags on Twitter
General Social Search Space Engines
- Stumble Upon: http://www.stumbleupon.com/ - Discover social media trends and conversations “favourited” by other users
- Scoopler.com: http://www.scoopler.com/about/ - Priority ranks real-time social media conversations in Flickr, Twitter and social bookmarking systems.
- Google Social Search: http://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/topic.py?topic=14117 - Personalize your social searches by creating a profile with Google. Connects the user to social media from within his or her own online social circle.
- One Riot: http://www.oneriot.com/ - What’s “trending right now across Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and Digg”
- Friendfeed: http://friendfeed.com/ - Social search among your own social network
- Convoflow: http://www.convoflow.com/ - Real-time social media conversation harvesting
- Bing Social: http://www.bing.com/social - Real-time Twitter and Facebook updates configured for your smartphone
- Social Mention: http://www.socialmention.com/ - Social media search alerts, and analysis (blog widgets available)
Resources (Articles):
Norm, Elrod. “Where Search and Social Media Collide: Real-time Search and Twitter.” [Blog]. Search Engine Watch. 25 March 2010. Accessed 7 August 2010: <http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/100325-130054>.
Sullivan, Danny. “What is Real-time Search? Definitions and Players.” [Blog]. Search Engine Land. 9 July 2009. Accessed 7 August 2010: <http://searchengineland.com/what-is-real-time-search-definitions-players-22172>.
Lin, Yongtao; Vaska, Marcus. “Grey Literature: Teaching in the Age of Mobile Computing.” [PowerPoint Presentation]. 7 May 2009. Accessed 7 August 2010: <http://www.ucalgary.ca/ftd2009/files/ftd2009/FTDGreyLiterature.ppt>.
Farace, Dominic J.; Schöpfel, Joachim. Grey Literature: Grey Literature in Library and Information Studies. 2010 <http://www.degruyter.de/cont/fb/bb/detailEn.cfm?id=IS-9783598117930-1>. (Note chapter on Twitter and blogs).
Yahoo Pipes Mashup Rewind
Yahoo Pipes: Image & Blog Entry
For my creation activity this week I used a free web tool called Yahoo Pipes to create a mashup. A couple of years ago, I had used Yahoo Pipes to create a simple aggregation of library 2.0 blogs to insert in a blog created for my writing task group at work. At the time there was very little documentation or tutorials to accompany Yahoo Pipes. Since the intention of the web tool was to make it easier to create mashups without programming knowledge, I was surprised that they had launched and advertised it without creating documentation first.
For my current mini-project I created a mashup of our class’s blogfeeds, and various photos (not from our class members though) from Flickr.com. Each blog post in the feed has 1 accompanying photograph which matches a flickr photo tag to the category set for each blog entry. I used a couple of tutorials to teach myself how to make this pipe.
Yahoo Pipes Modules
This pipe includes the following modules:
- Fetch (the container for all the RSS feeds from the blogs)
- Sort, to set date and ascending/descending order
- Two loops, one with a term extractor to get at the keywords, and one for Flickr.com to extract, match and display the 1 photograph per blog entry
The pipe I created can be viewed here:
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=c9f3ec779e6fda250838cd2b4ebec0ef
Note the tabs where you can either view “image” (hover over top to see the blog post entry) or “List” where you can see the blog post accompanied by the selected image from Flickr.com
Affordances:
Allows for …
- the creation of social media mashups
- the user to be creative
- the user to be able to create the mashup without handcoding
- the connecting and filtering of tag and category words from various social media applications
- the user to browse through pipes others have created to find inspiration.
- the cloning of pipes that others have created and the ability to mash them with their own pipes
- the user to publish his or her work to share with others
- the creation of a mashup of feeds/pipes that can be put on a website or blog
- the user to be able to visualize in diagram format the connections between the different modules
- the user to participate in the creation of documentation
- the user to participate in the discussion forum on the usage of pipes
- the user to load the pipe URL into his or her favourite newsreader
Constraints:
- Difficult for a beginner to use unless they have had some previous programming experience (or to at least be familiar with the programming terminology)
- Interface can be disorienting for the beginner, even after viewing the few available tutorials
- Lacks instruction for how and where to paste the badge code into the CSS stylesheets on a users’ website, so that it will display there
In short, while I was able to teach myself to do a slightly more complicated task this time around, and there is more functionality for media sharing (which was not there when they first launched the tool) as well as documentation, it was really tricky to use. Note that when I inserted the pipe in the RSS widget to show it on the bottom of my left-hand sidebar on this blog, the Flickr photos did not appear with each entry. Conclusion: not for the faint of heart.
Resources:
- Yahoo Pipes and Flickr tutorial:
http://webtrends.about.com/od/webmashups/ss/Yahoo-Pipes-how.htm - More sophisticated examples of what you can do with Yahoo Pipes and Flickr photos:
http://www.flickr.com/groups/flickrhacks/pool/tags/yahoopipes/
Remixes, Mashups, and Museum 2.0
QR Code
In his video Lessig Remix, Creative Commons licensing founder Lawrence Lessig asks the question “who owns culture?” His work in Creative Commons (CC) encourages the “remix” which we explored in our class in the section entitled “read-write-remix culture”. Lessig suggests that the actions of innovation and creativity are layered upon past thought and actions. He also points out that while we already have been instinctively remixing and redeveloping past innovations it is the concepts of copyright, attribution and payment infrastructures that have been challenged (Lessig 2007). I believe that these changes in how we perceive the publication and storing of materials in libraries is what is going to challenge our perception of what a library is.
Our course materials in this module also suggest that there may be instability and lack of cohesion in the recombining and the subsequent flow and delivery of information. In that sense, information professionals should stay attune to the development of information design and the impact that new media has on it (Giustini 2010). This discussion brought to mind an exhibit that I experienced at the Design Museum in London on a previous trip, where visitors could interact and remix a Pet Shop Boys video, for the song “Integral“, which was a mashup of media, smartphone technology, and information about current political issues. Other filmmakers were invited to use the exhibits’ digital assets for their own projects. According to its website regarding the Pet Shop boys video:
We created an interactive online music video that questioned the increased pressure on civil liberties in a digital society. Our creative solution was to make a film that contained subliminal content using visual bar codes that are readable via camera phones. These QR-codes contained links to websites with content relating to the issues raised in the video. We invited civil liberty activists and the PSB community to create web content to sit behind the barcodes as well as inviting them to appear in the video. Once the video was completed, the assets were made available online for people to make their own version of the film.
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RIP: Remix the Manifesto - online documentary on ‘read-write-remix culture”.
Online Collaboration and a Backpack
- group dynamics/communications/collaboration
Recently, I have participated in a number of collaborative group projects in my Master’s program , as well as previously in my online undergraduate courses. Some of these courses used online collaboration tools in combination with face-to-face meetings or (almost) completely online due to a mixture of on- and off-campus classmates. Key elements in collaboration include leadership and communications skills. But what about group dynamics? They’re undoubtedly important in any type of group work.
Upon reflection of the processes of my group projects I kept thinking back to the principles I learned during a personal development course that I had taken with Outward Bound . This course focused on leadership and group dynamics in cooperative and collaborative situations and how these principles made our group “gel” so that we could work effectively and comfortably together (and it wasn’t always easy in the great outdoors). My backpacking trip taught me a lot about group dynamics although it was often over-shadowed at moments due to sore feet, dehydrated backpacking goodies and the fact that none of us had taken a shower in a week. We literally started on “equal footing” since none of us had met each other before and we weren’t permitted to clique-off. All decisions and discussions were to be made as a group and we were all expected to play an equal role in any type of collaboration or cooperative situations. These “rules” faciliated, or perhaps forced, the development of our skills in the development of what our terms of engagement were, as well as problem-solving and decision-making.
Carl Yost suggests these ideas in his article “Social Constructivism, Adventure Education, and the Role of the Facilitator in Collaborative Learning” (Young Scholars in Writing: Undergraduate Research in Writing and Rhetoric, Fall 2003, v.1: 81-91), :
Collaborative learning has often been held as the silver bullet to all educational ills-by simply forcing students to work together in teams, pupils will become more motivated, self-determinant, and knowledgeable, while teachers will find their jobs simultaneously both easier and more rewarding. Because social constructionism holds that knowledge derives from the dialogic interactions of peers, placing people in dialogue with each other cannot help but lead them to a greater understanding of their world.
This statement seems to true enough, which is where personal reflections fit in after a project is completed and are quite valuable. For our most recent project we had used a wiki as a collaborative tool to create a wikipedia-type article , and then our second part was to post our reflections in our forum or on our blogs on what we thought about the process and what we had learned.
In Outward Bound, it was all face-to-face. However, with our wiki project it was all online. There were a number of communications constraints that we dealt with where emailing back-and-forth, or in some cases using online chat, was awkward because it lacked the quality of “live” conversation. Some of my observations were:
- Comfort level in editing others work on the wiki: It felt odd editing someone else’s work without having that big conversation. I for the most part, prefer GoogleDocs where I can see when someone else is editing at the same time I am. We c0uld also leave notes to each other which is updated live while we are on the document & we can highlight commentaries in colours to distinguish them from the text.
- While over-arching editing activities could be delegated , smaller editing issues were difficult to explain in email: If I saw something needed to be done, instinctively I wanted to just do it and having to email the group had the potential to slow down the process if there was a time constraint. But I often stopped myself short, because I felt I needed to have that conversation first.
How could some of the F2F advantages of Outward Bound be applied here to make the process easier? I would suggest that the first conversation be held online using Skype, or other conferencing equipment, and during that conversation that the “terms of engagement” be developed and recorded in writing for reference for the group. For a new group that has formed, or is working together for the first time this will “set the scene”, get the group to gel quicker and provide a foundation from which to work. I would also suggest that during this conversation the nature of the project be discussed and a consensus be reached on which web tool would best suit the project, so that the development of the writing or report will go smoothly.
Performance Anxiety? – Identity in SNS
Norwich, England
In her paper “All the World’s Wide Web’s a Stage: the Performance of Identity in Online Social Networks” (First Monday, v.14 n.3, 2 March 2009), Erika Pearson likens the representation and action of individuals on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, to that of the performance of an actor who as he or she wishes wears or removes a “masque“.
On social networks it’s easy enough to play a part, selecting what people see or know about you. To what extent is this a true representation and is it important? Sandra Chan, in “Wired_Selves: From Artifact to Performance” (CyberPsychology and Behavior, v.3 n.2 April 2000) also makes similar comments on personal webpages, that
” they are representations of ourselves, and in this sense, they are performance that we put up.”
To a certain extent we have always done this, even off-line. We “dress-to-impress” by wearing a suit to work to appear professional and serious, which may or may not reflect what we do or how we are during off work hours. Some create brands or personaes in both the business and entertainment industries to project a particular image. There are also others who go to science fiction conventions and dress-up as their favourite character creating a fantasy persona.
Now with social media there are many more ways and reasons to create personas or personal brands both in social networking systems (SNS) and online role-playing games such as SecondLife. The blending and the separation of the two are intriguing. A few years ago prior to my attendance at the first Vancouver Barcamp unconference (an informal participatory learning exchange for social media enthusiasts), one of the attendees prior to the conference used Twitter and Facebook status’ to create a faux reality that he was in Paris. Needless to say it confused his followers who were expecting to him to be attendance at the camp. He was trying to make a point about the blurring of realities in social media and the fluidity and non-linear nature of real and faux information. I’m still not sure what he was getting at, but he did provide a “performance of identity” in his charade.
Is performance necessary in social networks? Good question, and a difficult one to answer. In “From Realities to Values: A Strategy Framework for Digital Natives” (Computers in Libraries, v.30 n.4, May 2010) Helen Blower postulates that
”for most Digital Natives, there is no definitive divide between their physical identity and their digital footprint; they coexist as a singular entity. Digital Natives understand that in order to participate and be influential in today’s world, a digital identity can’t be treated as an add-on to life. It’s essential to everything, period.”
I couldn’t agree more. However, I also think that how we decide to portray our public or inner selves on-line is determined by an individual’s objectives when he or she selects which SNS to use, and it’s end purpose. Compare Facebook profiles between people who are using it for business, keeping in touch with close family members, or those who wish to be popular among friends & acquaintances. The type of information, photos and media that he or she posts there will be tailored depending on the reason why they created a profile in the first place. In the case of creating a profile or fan page on Facebook, where branding is important I would say that the perfomance is necessary since the person or page acts as an advocate for that organization or issue. Each item posted to that page is carefully selected to fall in line with that particular branding. A good example of a professional persona might be the David Suzuki Foundation on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/DavidSuzuki .
Considering the link between participation and one’s digital identity. Is it important to have a digital identity? It would depend on the individual’s or organization’s objectives. If they are looking to create a lot of connections and get the word out, creating a digital identity could be perceived as being important. With the increase in popularity in using smartphones and connecting using social media it may be well worth considering. However, despite the popularity there is a knowledge gap growing between users and non-users and traditional means of branding and cultivating a professional identity should not be forgotten and at the same time staying traditional means missing audience targets. Maintaining a balance would be ideal.
Should librarians/information professionals be embedded in digital spaces or not? Definitely. Librarians/information professionals are experts in the discovery, retrieval, and organization of information and they are also advocates and a source of information about copyright and privacy. These topics are extremely relevant right now and will continue to be for some time and as social networking systems and smartphones become more integrated into libraries and information agencies, we’ll need information professionals to maintain, direct and participate in the multi-directional flow of information.
Twitter’s Constraints Allow for Creativity
Screenshot of Twitter Tweets
Several years ago I took a course on media literacy . One of our more interesting discussions circled around the use of language for expressing ideas and how, when a person’s knowledge of that language wasn’t strong, they would become more creative in language expression based on their vocabulary constraints. This conversation came to mind when I considered the 140 character limit in online expression in the microblogging platform “Twitter“, where a user “tweets” his or her status, news or observations in this expression format. I would argue that Twitter’s greatest constraint, being that of the 140 character limit, could alternatively considered to be it’s greatest affordance, namely that it allows for creativity. In fact, this constraint does promotes creativity. A good example of a constraint promoting creativity is in the filmmaking industry where CGI is used for many special effects because you can do whatever you visualize in your imagination. However, I would argue that restrictions give rise to more creative solutions that are equally if not more effective. It does in fact “push us” there. Take the 1979 Ridley Scott film “Alien” for example, where restrictions on the cost and quality of the special effects, caused the filmmakers to use creative techniques. We never really got a good look at the alien which made the element of fear more poignant. Or when the android character of Ash, oozed a white substance when he cut himself. Very simple, but very effective (high concept, low tech).
In her paper “Creativity and unpredictability” (SEHR, v.4 n.2, 1995) , Margaret Boden supports this notion that constraints promote creativity:
“It follows that constraints, far from being opposed to creativity, make creativity possible. To throw away all constraints would be to destroy the capacity for creative thinking. “
A number of Twitter users have used the medium creatively:
- Brent Spiner - Former Star Trek – The Next Generation actor, uses tweets creatively to create an engaging, outrageous, and quite often funny fictional story about himself one sentence at a time. The collection of relevant tweets are archived here: http://colddeadfish.blogspot.com/2009/05/brent-spiners-twitter-story.html
- Poepi and the Giant - a children’s book written by Emmanuel Tangas in epic poetry format, continues it’s stories for its fans on Twitter: http://twitter.com/Fantasy_Author
- Twitterature – inspired by the short format of “tweets” two 19-year old re-work literature classics in the “tweet format”: http://www.twitterature.us/
- “The Royal Shakespeare Company Performs ‘Romeo and Juliet’ on Twitter“ - a creative re-working of a classic Shakespeare play in an alternative format: http://suchtweetsorrow.com/
Is this shortened format of expression spell the death of complex creativity as we know it? Or does it challenge it and provide a new means for digital storytelling. Please weigh in.
Welcome to LIBR559M
This category represents LIBR559M – Computer Based Topics: Social Media for Information Professionals, a course that I will be taking for the next six weeks. My blog posts will explore and discuss topics on social media and collaboration in the context of professional information agencies.
United Nations Dag Hammarskjöld Library Blog
I had a conversation the other day with a UBC librarian about the usefulness of using blogs for libraries. I myself have been a blog administrator for various university library committees and task groups where we would put our meeting notes up, a case where we thought that we should put it out there in the happenstance that another university or library out there some where could use the information if they happen to be involved in a similar project. Well, we are definitely putting the information out there, but is it being found? Is it actually useful to someone out there? Hard to tell, since there are very few commentaries being left with each post, therefore it doesn’t seem that any communities are created around this information. Does this mean that having a blog isn’t worthwhile? Good question.
In her paper “The use of Weblogs (blogs) by librarians and libraries to disseminate information” (IR Information Research Vol. 12 No. 4, October 2007) Judit Bar-Ilan points out that “Some blogs contain links to Web sites or to other blogs and their main purpose is to discuss the contents of the linked sites or simply to inform about the existence of the sites/products. Such blogs are usually topic oriented and disseminate information without personal involvement”, and she goes on to refer to this type of blog as a “telegraph-style blog”, which serves the librarians’ purpose of being part of the medium involved in the “flow of information“.
One such “telegraph-style blog” is held at the UN Library and according to the United Nations Dag Hammarskjold Library website:
“The Library’s legislative mandate was established by the General Assembly in document A/C.5/298 of 28 September 1949 … The purpose is to provide library services, including maintenance of an archival collection of United Nations documents and publications and in-house production and processing of data, for use by delegates, missions and United Nations staff members, as well as by specialized researchers, while enabling all libraries of the United Nations system to function as a user-oriented network. Furthermore, the Library is to establish depository libraries worldwide for dissemination of United Nations information.”
UN Pulse Blog
UN Pulse from UN Website Homepage
I think that this tool fits well with its mandate to provide and disseminate information on human rights, in particularly because the alerts provide links to relevant documents. If this were my area of interest I would definitely be subscribing to this service. This blog is well-tailored to suit it’s audience, the patrons who want up-to-date information on UN issues.
FlickPlusMyBlog Mashup
- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
