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9/19/2012

Measuring Social Media

My column for this month’s Computer in Libraries magazine  on measuring digital media is available this month as a free html.  Since this doesn’t happen very often, I thought it was worth noting :-)

  • Measuring Social Media and the Greater Digital Landscape


    Remember the good old days of the internet, when the measurement of your organization’s digital landscape was merely tracked in page hits, site visits, and unique visitors? The tools used for tracking and reporting website usage were simple and straightforward then. Data always came from the same primary source, the server’s log files.

    If you were into detailed analytics, you could extract a huge mountain of data from these files—everything from tracking what sites provided the most traffic through referrals (i.e., links) and what pages were the entry points to the most popular content pages and average time per session. Keeping track of the digital world was definitely easier back then, before Facebook, Twitter, and an explosion of new mobile apps ripped through this simple-to-measure bits and bytes landscape. Today, understanding your organization’s digital impact requires analyzing multiple sets of analytics from a variety of sources. With measurement rulers seldom the same, it’s a challenge to pull it all together.

Read more.  

9/17/2012

International Young Librarians Academy

It’s been a fast few weeks since I flew to Latvia to participate as an instructor in the International Young Librarians Academy.  Although my schedule didn’t allow for me to stay for all of the weeklong event, my time in Yentspils with over 50 young librarians from all over Eastern Europe was memorable and enlightening.  So much enthusiasm, fresh ideas and energy! I was indeed sorry to leave when I had to.

Anyway,  here are the slides from my main presentation on modern libraries.  As one young librarian from Prague commented afterwards…  “what I like most about your message from you talk was that it isn’t technology that makes a library modern, it’s the philosophy”



PS:  Thanks Dara for blogging this summary of the talk.  You hit the key points well.