Teaching social media in public libraries – Danish experiences

Abstract

Purpose – The paper aims to report on a Danish Web 2.0 user training project from 2009. Besides, reporting the main results of the project, the paper discusses some broader perspectives concerning social media in library context. Many public and academic libraries worldwide have, inspired by the American “23 Things” Web 2.0 training program, been involved in training and educating both of their internal staff and of their users. The key questions are: whether concepts like “23 Things” and the like are likely to contribute to solving the problems of the computer illiterate segments of the population and whether Web 2.0, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and the like represent subjects which should be legitimately taught as part of professional public and academic library activities. Design/methodology/approach – Based on systematic evaluation of public library-based social media courses, inspired by the “29 Things” concept, targeted at users. Findings – The article points out that it is questionable whether the “2...