I'm in the final stages of preparing a talk on social software tools I'll be giving on Thursday at the Rhode Island Library Association Annual Conference. As I prepare my slides about the concept of "going where users are," it's occurred to me that librarians don't always need to make an either/or choice. We don't need to decide whether to post content on our library's site or on a remote site where we know our users are looking for content. Because of the features and functionalities of many 2.0 sites, there are ways to establish a presence for the same material in both places. Not only this, but remote services can give us important 2.0 functionalities that we might not have locally.

Needless to say, these aren't new discoveries on my part. LIke everyone else, I see links from local sites to collections on external 2.0 sites all the time. I'm simply looking at this phenomenon in a different light. I've been thinking this over because I imagine that there are librarians who resist placing content on external 2.0 sites because the "proper" place is the library's own site. If the proposition isn't either/or, the argument for remote posting is easier to make.

Here's an example of what I mean. Let's say you want to upload photos of your library's services, events, etc. onto Flickr because you want to establish a presence there. But you also want your Web site visitors to know that these photos exist. I'm going to use the photo collection of the Stillwater Free Library. It's in my neck of the woods, and it also has a blog for a Web site: two thumbs up!

» Here is the library's photo collection on Flickr.

» Here is the RSS feed of the library's photo collection.

» Finally - and all importantly - here is the Flickr badge on the library's Web site. This links to the library's collection on Flickr.

So, if you want people to know about your photos, use the Flickr badge as the link from your local site to your collection on Flickr. If you want to give people the option to track new photos added to your collection, use Flickr as your RSS service. If you incorporate these things onto your static Web site, you've taken steps toward moving your site into 2.0 territory.

I like the options even more for resource collections. For this, I'll show an example of work done with Del.icio.us by Heather Moulaison, Modern Languages Librarian at The College of New Jersey.

» Using JavaScript, Heather has integrated some of her Del.icio.us bookmarks onto her page on Italian Studies. (She's using a variation on the JSON method shown on the Del.icio.us site.)

» She has put a Del.icio.us tag cloud at the bottom of her page for linking back to each tag's corresponding page on Del.icio.us.

» And of course, each Del.icio.us tag has its own RSS feed.

The only drawback I can see is that sometimes the page loads a bit slowly while all the scripts kick in. Nonetheless, Heather has given her users the best of both worlds: a presence on Del.icio.us and a presence on her local Web site, with the added bonus of tags and RSS. I really like the idea of using a tag cloud for content navigation, and would have exploited this functionality - and the RSS feeds for each tag - even more.

Placing your content where users are does not have to mean an absence of content on your local Web site. It can actually mean the same content with increased functionalities. We have so many choices these days for mixing and matching, linking, tagging and updating. I hope that an emphasis on this point will help our colleagues experiment with a presence on sites popular with users.