Showing posts with label twitter. Show all posts
Showing posts with label twitter. Show all posts

Tuesday, July 16, 2013

My challenge

My challenge is to identify a social tool, a web service or a new idea gleamed from my professional reading that I think will take off in FY14, and give a 3 minute presentation on it to my colleagues. I've been thinking of so many different things for this challenge (inspired by 23 mobile things and my tweet stream mostly!) such as infographics, MOOCs, Google hangouts, coding for beginners, etc. I want to feature something that is perhaps new to my colleagues and that could have a direct impact on our work.

I'm choosing Twitter for this challenge, but not for the usual reasons of networking with a fellow librarians and keeping up with emerging trends ... although these are of course huge reasons for signing up. I'm going to be focusing on the benefits of following the tweets of library vendors, aggregators, government departments and so on. Because our college is focussed so narrowly on one subject area we can easily follow organisations that are related to just this field, plus those who provide our resources. This kind of information usually arrives in our inboxes as email newsletters, but for those who want an alternative, well, there's this. Here are some tweets that I've picked out from my stream in the past couple of months. They feature

  • Upgrade alerts to products we use such as Mendeley and Discovery Search
  • Info about relevant new journals, ebooks and apps
  • Free training and PD opportunities
  • Links to relevant resources that could be useful additions to our Libguides 

Warning: Very long list of embedded tweets follows!



















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Monday, May 13, 2013

Lurk, Broadcast, Create, Engage

There's lots of stuff floating around the Interwebs at the moment about engagement with social media.

Like this Stages of PLN adoption infographic and article, written a few years ago but still provoking discussion.

Abigail asked, which stage are you at?
OK, so I've definatley been through the stages of immersion (twice...) and evaluation (including irrational frustration that some of my key people are not on Twitter). I think I'm possibly going through the know it all stage again right now with the 23 Mobile Things course. I love the perspective stage, leaving it all behind to enjoy a wireless holiday (gone is that jittery addiced feeling!). And finally balance. A worthy goal. I tried a bit of balance yesterday. After realising that I'd been connected and connecting online all day, I read a book in the evening. But why did by mind keep sneakily returning to my mobile and my Twitter feed? I didn't allow myself to check it, but whatever happened to the days that I could immerse myself in a book and not be distracted by ANYTHING?

One way I've decided to combat this addictive feeling, apart from consciously choosing to switch off when it's sensible to do so, is to be less of a lurker / broadcaster and more of a creater / engager. It forces me to slow down and choose what to respond to, which is whatever moves me to do so. I've been a terrible lurker in the past. But I'm determined to change. Here's my list:

1. Use my blog to reflect on what moves me
2. Post comments on others' blogs
3. Converse more, broadcast less on Twitter and Instagram

Another thing I liked recently was this post on the Forbes website. Jessica's post was called How to be Interesting but I would re-title it Being the Best You Can Be (sounds less like you're tyring to please someone, doesn't it?) or even Things to Consider When Blogging. She's got 10 points, each with a cute little infographic. One of them was "embrace your innate weirdness" - apparently that's what makes us as indiviuals interesting.

 My favourite blogs to follow are the ones that have a little bit of personal / strange content as well as lots of professional content. Now to implement that in my own blog...
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Saturday, May 11, 2013

23 mobile things - Twitter

Mobiles and libraries - topics occupying my mind a lot at work lately! So it's great timing that the Australia and NZ 23 Mobile Things has come along. I'm planning to examine one thing each week for the next 23 weeks, and to reflect on it here.

The first thing is Twitter, and I'll start with a history of my use. At first I was uninterested. I had a look when it started to take off and thought it was full of inane, uninteresting 140 character tweets about boring details of people's personal lives. People I didn't know. But then I started a serious-sounding subject at Curtin University called Information Management Technology and my lecturer Kathryn Greenhill set  learning how to use Twitter as our first assignment, so I was forced to take a closer look.

Actually, I'm glad I did. As an external student (I started the course while living in Japan) I found I had an instant network of people who were interested in libraries and information just like I was, and posted not just comments, but also questions, answers, links to library news, blogposts and reports and all sorts of other things. I started to see the value in it.

I was using Twitter at the exact time of the massive earthquake in Japan that resulted in the deaths of thousands of people and the nuclear catastrophe at Fukushima. I felt the earthquake, rushed outside until it subsided, then went back in and tweeted it. Less that a minute after the earthquake, my fellow students in Australia had heard the news. When other types of communication failed in the aftermath, Twitter was used by people to contact relatives and friends, and for emergency services to direct people, especially foreigners, to safety.

Now I use Twitter pretty much every day to see what's new and to feel connected to the library world. I have to admit that I lurk more than I post, and more often than not that's a retweet. One of my new year's resolutions was actually to tweet more! After exploring Twitter again as part of 23 Mobile Things  I've starting using lists to filter my Twitter stream.

The academic / health library I work at doesn't use social media (yet!). I'm informally gathering ideas on what kind of things libraries tweet about. There's a good list on the 23 Mobile Things blog, most of which I think would be relevant for my library.
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