Can You Digg It?

Thing 12 is about social media sites, none of which I had used before. I can see where they would be really useful if you work in a public library, a college/university library, or even a special library with a contemporary focus. For an archives and historical library, however, it's work-related uses seem limited to me.

With more and more historical issues of newspapers going online, however, perhaps some day someone will invent a social media site for historical news! Now that would be useful for work!

I was a wee bit surprised that there are so many sites that do essentially the same thing (Digg, Mixx, Newsvine, Reddit, and StumbleUpon--I was surprised you didn't include Technorati, I had at least heard of that one). It would be interesting to know if they all have pretty much the same type of clientele, or if different age groups, or different interest groups tend to favor one over the other.

More useful for work is putting those bookmarklets on our webpages to make it easy for those who do use those sites to comment on our webpages and make our library known "out there." We currently have them only on the Collections Departments' blog and podcast page. I need to look into Reference Department pages that could benefit from having bookmarklets.