Recently, I’ve thought a lot about social networking sites, especially comparing Facebook with Ravelry.com (a site for Knitters, Crocheters, and Spinners) and how they relate to wikis and blogs by librarians and for libraries.
I wonder if I’m more comfortable at Rivelry because 1) it’s more structured or 2) it revolves my great obsessions. Facebook feels too amorphous to me; I can’t seem to get settled. But at Rivelry, I jumped in right away, setting up my own group — Guerilla Knitters (knitters who perform public art with knitting or crochet), writing to others, setting up projects I’m working on, and contacting people I know from other cities who are obsessed with knitting and spinning, too.
Ravelry allows each member to organize his or her knitting or crocheting projects, library, yarn, needles/hooks, and design plans online. Furthermore, each of these can link to other people’s projects that are using the same materials or patterns. So, you can find people doing similar work as you.
And you can find people in groups that others have founded based on geography, love of a yarn, a pattern, a style of knitting, spinning, or a movie that has great handknits in it (like A Christmas Story!)
Knitting becomes even more collaborative through the Internet. It’s how I became a spinner years ago through listservs and bulletin boards.
Social networking and collaborative work are both hot topics. Here are some sources:
Can our library work become even more collaborative in the same way? Students can communicate with each other about their research experiences — what works, what doesn’t — everything becomes richer and easier. Is structure the answer?
Could students set up their research projects with links that connect them to other students who use the same databases, methodologies, topics, or books? Is this already done with current classroom websites? But if it’s done across universities, there could be much more collaboration and students could learn research much like real professors and researchers do.
