Social Technologies & Libraries in 2010

A great blog post by Michael Stephens provides thoughts from both inside and outside the library community as to the future of social media technology. Summarized Michael made the following three predictions from the library community perspective:

1. Social media policies will become more prevalent
Because it is not going away anytime soon, Michael recommends that every library either create and/or refresh its social media policies. His advice includes " work from examples from all realms and take no more than three meetings to hash out the policy and send it on. Things will be changing too fast to meet for weeks or months."

2. Evaluation will come into its own

Take a step back and see what's working and what's not. Drop things that don't and add ones that do. Some key things to consider during the evaluation process: the newness of the tools, the varying degrees of use by library users and staff and the time/resource saving involved.

3. Libraries will become community leaders in teaching social tools

Those libraries that have taken the step to offer Learning 2.0 or integrated social tools into their services are position to take the next step which according to Michael is—educating governing bodies and their community of users.

See Michael's blog post for further insights.