Promoting your Library with SlideShare

As a liaison librarian, one of my main responsibilities is to offer and provide instruction sessions to students and faculty in my liaison departments. Over the last month (or so), I have given (or co-given, I suppose) at least seven different presentations and instruction sessions to medical campus faculty, staff, students, fellows, and residents (and an assortment of others I'm sure). And, since I'm a relatively new librarian, I don't necessarily feel like I'm an expert on or in anything (and especially not on anything health sciences related), so for every one of these presentations, I had to, essentially, teach myself everything I wanted or was expected to teach others. And, alas, finding high quality EBM literature was not something I normally did in my pre-librarian days.

But, not to fear, I did manage to get by, thanks - in large part - to my colleagues, who were, as one can only hope of colleagues, extremely helpful and understanding, and thanks - in partial part - also to, of all things, the social site SlideShare, which fed me content like nobody's business.

SlideShare is a free, web-based presentation sharing site that allows users to upload, download, view, tag, and rate other users' PowerPoint (and other types of) presentations. The content is completely user-driven, and the site therefore fits well alongside some of those other popular content sharing sites, like YouTube, Wikipedia, Digg, Flickr, and so on. Since participation in the site is free, the Health Sciences Libraries at the University of Michigan has actually created a public account to make many of their presentations more visible and accessible. Needless to say, this public account became, for obvious reasons, a good friend of mine during this time. A really good friend, yes.

But not only is SlideShare a great place to find - yes, decontextualized - presentation information, it is also a great place for librarians to market themselves and their libraries. Some of the presentations in the University of Michigan's Health Sciences Libraries account have been viewed more than one thousand times, and as time goes by, the number of views will only increase (unless, of course, the site disappears one day and, then, well, that's that. But, until then, the presentations are 'out there').

In any case, take a look at some of the presentations in SlideShare and consider whether this is a worthwhile promotional tool for your library -- it certainly doesn't require much time and effort, though the site can be, I hate to say, frustratingly slow.

And, that, I'm glad to say, is all I got.