Librarians as champions....

I read with interest this statement made by Kathryn Greenhill on her blog.  She says:

"I threw in a bit about the tools that I thought their staff should know about already.  If you work to connect information and people, there is no excuse to still not know about:
- blogs
- wikis
- RSS
- screencasting
- online virtual worlds
- podcasting
- photo and image sharing
- folksonomies
- social bookmarking
- cloud computing
- gaming and libraries"

Phew!  What a very cool list of tools that we as librarians should know about!  The fun starts in discovering ways to use these tools to promote who we are and what we do, thus encouraging greater access to our online and physical environments. I have said it before, but  for our library this could mean a Flickr account that all the regional libraries can have access to, telling our library's story through digital photo stories (I have done this and am hoping to do another when I finish uni) an internal and external library blog and a  local history wiki.  Many of the members of our staff have worked at our library for over ten years, with some 22 and 25 years!  An internal wiki would allow them to share some of the knowlwdge they have with the rest of us. If along the way we discover that a particular tool is not relevant to what we do, well that's ok, because at least we know about them, and can, if need be impart this information.

I read this quote in  the American Library Journal, and I have it written above my desk, "Librarians must be viewed as champions of new forms of information and access" - Eisenberg 2008.  May I continue to do so.