I keep going back to the Lankes, Silverstein, and Nicholson article in the December issue of ITAL.* They did a really nice job of creating a theoretical framework to support the use of social networking technologies in libraries. It’s consistent with some of the work I do with students in research methodology courses as we talk about the social construction of knowledge and it reminds me of conversations with those who study narrative theories. I’ve been wondering, though, how one might measure the conversations.

If one assumes that facilitating conversations is part of the work of the library, how do we measure our effectiveness? Number of conversations? Decibel level? Circulation? Web logs? And what of the quality of conversation? Would the quality be seen in written and oral work submitted in classes?

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* R. David Lankes, Joanne Silversteign, and Scott Nicholson, “Partiicipatory Networks: The Library As Conversation,” Information Technology and Libraries 26, no. 4 (December 2007): 17-33.

I’ve been thinking more about the importance of conversations in the library. For a number of years I’ve talked about our collection embodying a conversation that spans centuries and continents, but it’s been harder to think about how to facilitate an ongoing conversation with our current library users. Certainly we do so by way of reference transactions but those seem fewer than I would like.

One of the pedagogical premises behind the direction we are headed in the Theology Library is that “knowledge is created through conversation.” We are trying to find ways to facilitate an ongoing conversation among our library users. I’ve been interested in how we might imagine the online catalog facilitating conversation. A couple months ago I embedded a Scriblio interface to a small collection of digital objects into the History of Missiology Web site. The idea is that we can allow users to comment on the texts. I decided to give it a try on a little larger basis. I’ve begun loading records from our online catalog into another instance of scriblio. This may be a way of providing a forum for conversation…

http://comm745-server.bu.edu/alt_cat/