Animoto, Blio, Connotea, Hulu, Mikogo, Ning, Prezi, Qwika, Rondee, Shelfari, Xing, Zoho, Zotero: these words were clearly picked to stand out from the crowd. Desperate for distinctiveness in a world of top tens, these often very useful free tools and services have succeeded, at least temporarily, in providing islands of identity in the infosphere of social networks, as well as capitals of convenience. Just as the great powers have spread their cultural influence through names like Cologne, Cook, London, Troy or Victoria, so the new zippy warriors battle for the infosphere. They aim to be findable celebrities where participation is expected rather than just a comfortable place to lurk.
This directory of opportunity, possibility, utility and fun is an A-Z of the free infosphere, filtered for the use of librarians and information literacy support staff. It is larger than many modern librarianship textbooks, but made highly accessible not just by its alphabetical sequence but also by its entry structure. This consists of the resource title, its category and web address, overview, features, a section on how cybrarians can use this resource and an endnote section with references. There is also an FYI highlight box with snippets of interesting information and statistics complementing the other insights.
Whatever you are planning to do for your public in your library, there is something here that will inspire you and help you to achieve your goal. Your time is likely to be saved by using this book to gain a more comprehensive and balanced understanding of what is on offer, even if you may feel you could probably compile such a work yourself given time. The author has also used her considerable skills to filter the content so that almost all the entries will be of some interest at this level to the library strategist, project manager, administrator, author or support person.
Some of the entries are well-known: SurveyMonkey, Wikipedia, WorldCat and Twitter. Bing, the search engine, is one example. It is included, whereas the “king” of the search engines, Google, is not, because the idea is to spread awareness, encourage exploration beyond the known world, and Google is already known by everyone, at least to some extent. Instead, the book does include a range of other less well-known Google services for end users, such as Google Analytics, Google Books and Google Reader. These will appeal to library staff for their own use and for promotion to library users. There is less emphasis on free tools for back-room tasks such as running shared library PCs or communications infrastructure, although the information systems/library boundary is always shifting, and some with the word library in their job title will already be using free software such as FOG Server to replicate disk images of their PC software for ease of management: this is excluded. As librarians begin to perform their work more and more alongside and together with their customers in specific social spaces on the web, more of the tasks currently in the back-room may emerge onto the web-front; and not just in public libraries handed over to volunteers to run for cost saving reasons.
Useful as this volume is, it does not always assist with some of the issues that may arise for cybrarians planning to use these tools. The level of detail here is not always sufficient to allow the reader to know whether the free, often limited, version of the tool will do the job or whether a premium version must be paid for. The websites themselves sometimes blur the boundaries in their advertising, deliberately or otherwise. Free software is often supported by advertising, but this may not always be clear. Because such aspects are not structural parts of the directory, it cannot be relied upon to mention them.
Often, as with Doodle, a service provides a blog to offer news of updates, guidance and advice or clarification. It might have been useful to have some kind of symbol attached to entries to highlight this in a standard way.
Another extremely important issue is whether the licence terms of the software or service cover its intended use. Does the licence allow business use? Which legal jurisdiction does the product come under – Doodle uses the laws of Switzerland, for example? Indeed some of the services here are mainly aimed at the US, or academic libraries under education use terms, otherwise they are chargeable. Licensing should have been highlighted more clearly to reflect its importance and the frequent reluctance of staff and their users to research the topic in favour of convenience.
If the terms of the tool provider require registration and the details to be valid, correct and up-to-date (as for Doodle), can libraries keep this promise and what procedures will they need in place to do so?
Some aspects of these tools will be controversial: advertising may be included as a requirement, and services may become chargeable at any time, requiring staff to monitor terms and conditions effectively and to confer and consult over public relations aspects. Choosing a tool from this directory is not the end of the process therefore and more guidance on management aspects could perhaps have been included. There are also continual changes (for example, LibreOffice has replaced OpenOffice as the free office software of choice for many), and the publisher offers a website (www.cybrariansweb.com) to try to address the issue.
This book is, however, a handy and accessible start to a process. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, enormous effort went into producing directories of places, trades and so on. People may be less willing to go to such effort in future, relying on search engines, social networks and crowd-sourcing to highlight products and services. Effort by experienced and skilled individuals such as this author can still save others a great deal of time and help avoid mistakes and distractions. A few minutes reference to this book could inspire many to navigate the right kind of innovation in the most budget conscious way.
