Finding a use for Storify! > Make or tell a story using social media.

Storify (http://www.storify.com) is a web delivered service which claims to help make sense of what people post on social media, allowing users curate social media interactions and turn them into stories, with the idea of creating a 'social' perspective on any event, which can then be published either via Storify, social media sharing, or embedding on other pages. 

While exploring the capabilities of ISSUU (see post below), I also began exploring the usefulness of Storify in a library capacity. This took a bit more effort than ISSUU to get to grips with. It's not that it's hard to use, it just needs more attention to detail. So far the most explicit use I can see for it for the library is the gathering of social media content about events, conferences and discussion treads.  My nebulus attempts can be seen at https://storify.com/LibraryITTD#stories

I have mocked up monthly reads using it's capacity to import data from set URL's, but I am not satisfied with the result... so the experimentation will continue over the summer with those. I liked being able to pull information directly from our catalogue into the story, but the presentation of it left much to be desired (an issue relating to how III runs the OPAC rather than Storify I must say), but did link the viewer back to the library's catalogue. The one's I pulled from Amazon and Many Books looked at lot better, but conversley drew them away from the library as provider. 

• https://storify.com/LibraryITTD/october-2013-library-reads-banned-books-available

• https://storify.com/LibraryITTD/september-2013-library-reads-top-10-fiction-classi

• https://storify.com/LibraryITTD/august-2013-library-reads-sci-fi

• https://storify.com/LibraryITTD/july-2013-monthly-reads-at-library-itt-dublin

I have pulled photos from FLICKR into a story and that looks much better. And with better management of tagging our photos, and actually loading them this could really work for events and locations. https://storify.com/LibraryITTD/photos-of-library-itt-dublin
I have pulled facebook and twitter posts associated with the library into another but can't get it to do the expected automatic updating based on a # tag, so I will experiment further with the tag for the IIUG which is being held here in ITT Dublin next month to see if that generates any further developments. So we'll see what happens at: https://storify.com/LibraryITTD/iiug-13-itt-dublin/ ... 

I attempted to gather 'news' items about the library... but it doesn't look great. https://storify.com/LibraryITTD/what-is-being-said-about-library-itt-dublin/

I have successfully embedded these into the library's website, so at least I got that bit right!!! 

So I suppose for the moment it's a case of watch this space... 

Of course there are other options for collecting information for a 'story', but if I told you all about them, that'd ruin your fun? (You tube, Instagram, Google etc.)