Jenny Levine makes a great case on The Shifted Librarian for adding a feature to your sites that allows users to easily share your content via social networks.  Not only will this offer a way for your users to help spread the work about services and activities that you offer, but it can help them keep track of information they find so that they can revisit it later.  This will be a benefit for users of mobile browsers, which are rapidly becoming a more significant portion of visitors to our web sites.

You may notice that I have followed her advice and have added the Add to Any service to this blog, visible at the bottom of every post (and checked to ensure it validates against XHTML and CSS standards, of course; a requirement I have for any add-on).

There is now a READ Mini Poster creation tool on the American Library Association web site which lets you upload a photo into one of four templates.  This is a neat offering, with a couple of caveats:

1. The positioning tool for the picture is very limited.  I was only able to use my facebook profile picture in two of the templates, and each still didn’t look quite right.  I have been spoiled by Web 2.0 tools such as Facebook’s Pieces of Flair (note that there is a piece of Libology flair, if you are feeling desperate for library-related buttons) and expect such niceties as mouse-controlled positioning.
2. In addition, there are no terms of use listed for these creations.  Knowing that ALA limits the use of other versions of the Read posters, I assume that they would make a specific statement regarding this on the creation page.  I wasn’t even able to load their copyright statement page, so I feel forced to go with default copyright.

These reasons are why I don’t have my newly-minted READ Mini Poster shown here.  This is a great promotional idea, if they can work out how to let us use it effectively.

thanks to Karen R. Schneiderman for posting a link to the Lex Scripta blog on Facebook!

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Update: Jenny Levine, Internet Development Specialist & Strategy Guide for the ALA (and also known as The Shifted Librarian) wrote an e-mail assuring me that “these images can be used by the person generating them for use on personal or library blogs, personal profiles, or other social networking sites.”  When the ALA updates their site next week, this will be clearly spelled out, she says.

I suspect that criticism can easily sound snarky in this medium, so I will re-iterate the dominant point from above:  this is a great promotional idea for the ALA, libraries, social media, and readers.  Check it out!