Social Media Competencies for Librarians

On Stephen Abrams' blog last year he wrote about the Top Ten Social Media Competencies for Librarians (& Teachers).

What are these competencies? Where have they come from? Have they been widely adopted?

Dean Giustini writing on The Search principle blog gives some more information: Top ten (10) social media competencies for librarians.

Murphy & Moulaison are advocating that “social media competencies” be recognised as a new set of literacies required for librarians who work in the Web 2.0 environment. They presented a paper at the ACRL 14th National Conference, Pushing the Edge: Explore, Engage, Extend, Seattle, 2009. The PDF to the full paper is here.

The draft list of these social media competencies is:

• understand, explain and teach others about the main principles and trends of Web 2.0 (and Library 2.0)

• list major tools, categories and affordances of social networking

• apply social media to solve information problems, and communicate digitally with users

• use social networking sites for promotional, reference and instructional services in libraries

• navigate, evaluate and create content on social networking sites

• follow netiquette, conform to ethical standards, and interact appropriately with others online

• explain copyright, security and privacy issues on social media sites to colleagues and user communities

• understand the importance of identity and reputation management using social media

• explain related terminology such as collaboration 2.0, remix and open source

• renew social media competencies, advocate for institutional strategies and policies, and build an evidence base in social media

Murphy and Moulaison are advocating that we go beyond just gaining knowledge of how to use particular Web 2.0 technologies to gain an understanding of the changing information landscape in which librarians operate.

I think these are really useful competencies and have been thinking about how they can be applied. I'll like to see them more widely discussed.