On Monday, I gave a presentation on networking and marketing yourself using online tools at the New Professionals Conference in London. It was the first time I’d spoken at a conference and I really enjoyed the day; it was great to discuss my interests (i.e. new technologies) with other new professionals. I’ll write a more detailed post about the day itself soon.

I chose to talk about online networking and personal marketing as I thought it would be particularly relevant to new professionals,  and I could share my own experiences. My presentation introduced professional networking and then went on to discuss three web tools which can be used for professional networking; blogging, microblogging and social networking. I introduced each tool and how it can be used for professional networking, and shared my own experiences of them using the Joeyanne Libraryanne blog, Twitter and Facebook as examples. I concluded with 10 top tips to get the most out of using online networking tools for professional purposes.

I have added both the presentation and conference paper to my Slideshare account, and they are also embedded below (easiest to view if you use the fullscreen option). Please let me know what you think, is there anything I’ve overlooked?

iTunesU and Podcasting

Laurie Roberts, Liaison Librarian at QMU, explained the use of podcasting at QMU and introduced iTunesU (iTunes University) – watch introductory video for an overview.

You can download a copy of Laurie’s presentation, which includes relevant links as well as her notes.

As part of Laurie’s job role, she has the task to investigate use of Web 2.0 technologies and how they can be used to support the library services. Laurie therefore “plays” with web 2.0 technologies, explores potential use for library, and attends courses to discover new tools and share good practice. Currently, QMU are using a library blog, Flickr account (to share photos of the library and any events they hold), Facebook page, YouTube videos, Twitter, and Meebo (for virtual enquiries) to communicate with their users and support the library service.

The focus of this particular presentation was podcasting and iTunesU, so Laurie began with an introduction to podcasting and some recommendations such as purchasing a decent headphone/microphone and using software such as Audacity to edit any mistakes.

At QMU, physiotherapy lecturers use video podcasts to teach anatomy – students can watch these at their own pace either on a PC or on their own mp3 players, iPods etc. The students appeared to engage more in this style learning and were able to prepare themselves for practical sessions by watching the podcasts and reading the recommended resources. There are around 50 videos on the examination and assessment for physiotherapists, and Laurie found that other academic schools were also using video podcasts to support learning.

Laurie decided to investigate the possibility of adding this material to a central store so that this material could be used by different students (e.g. nursing students may find the physiotherapist podcasts useful). After attending a seminar at the Apple Training Suite in London about iTunesU, Laurie decided it may be a useful service for QMU to use, and contacted academic departments to see if they would be interested in adding videos/podcasts for students to use. The emphasis is that “content is king” and it must be an institutional effort incorporating lecturers, IT, legal, marketing etc.

In order to set up an iTunesU account, there are quite a few hoops to jump through and the process takes quite a while. iTunes like you to have 300 items before going live, and ensure that you keep it up-to-date so that the page isn’t stagnant. You can have a public page (i.e. open to anyone), a private page (apparently works with Shibboleth or other authentication methods), or a combination of the two. QMU have 16 subject categories and are now organising the 400 items they currently have before launching the site. The front page can also be customised so designers are working on building an institutional page.

QMU are hoping to record some lectures to add these to iTunesU, possibly by using Echo 360 ( which I hadn’t heard of before but have since watched a great video from University of Birmingham). They are also hoping to record some student and staff views about the University to add to the iTunesU page, marketed as “Life at QMU”. I asked about library material and at the moment there are no plans to add library videos/podcasts, although they may consider it in future. They currently have library videos produced using Microsoft Photo Story 3, which could probably be re-used or adapted and added to iTunesU.

University of Warwick was recommended as a good example of an iTunesU page; Cambridge and Oxford also have a presence on there (as do Open University and Coventry University I have just found).

QMU have iTunes software on 10 of their PCs in the LRC, which are wiped each night to clear the iTunes libraries. I wonder how other institutions offer iTunes to students without having the issues of different music libraries, is there is a way to enable viewing of iTunesU material without having to edit the iTunes library? I guess syncing is an issue, would be good if you could just do it one way to add a video/podcast to a device but not alter anything else on there.

I’m really glad I managed to attend this session, it covered a lot of information about iTunesU which I didn’t realise but also some advice from lessons they have learnt at QMU which I will take back to my place of work. A presence on iTunesU is a big commitment; it needs to be an institutional decision and requires co-ordination of many departments. In terms of mobile learning though I think it could really help developments in education.

Interestingly, I updated my iPod Touch software to OS 3.0 when I got back from the conference, and noticed the iTunesU is now available directly from the iPhone/iPod Touch. I was really pleased to see this as I think the iPhone/iPod Touch can be a great tool in education; hopefully developments such as this will really help mobile learning gain popularity.

Building a customer centred space – using observation to inform library design

Rachel Van Riel from Opening the Book gave a thoroughly inspiring talk about observing library users and how to adjust your library to suit your user’s needs. This is something that I was particularly interested in from a work point of view as I am responsible for a special collection for our trainee teachers and I’m not sure how it is currently used but feel it could be better utilised if it was laid out differently.

Rachel spoke about how libraries can learn a lot from retail and recommended Paco Underhill’s Why We Buy: the Science of Shopping (which I’ve added to my wishlist!) as well as the TV programmes Mary, Queen of Shops and I’m Running Sainsbury’s. Rachel referred to some of the interesting findings of Underhill, including the fact that 2 out of 3 shoppers want no assistance, and 50% of those who touch an item buy it. Obviously libraries are slightly different to shops, but many of the principles are transferable to libraries.

Rachel emphasised the importance of observing your library users, as we often have assumptions which may not be correct. Much of Rachel’s research so far has been with public libraries, but she has also observed in academic libraries with surprising findings. Some examples of her research include:

• Leaflets in an entrance area which were observed by security from 9am until 7pm. 1726 visitors entered the area; only 15 looked at the leaflets and no one took a leaflet. The institution re-considered the placement of the leaflets. Rachel’s advice is to try different places and observe – how many look, how many take – get evidence to help your decisions.
• Time of visit – could be observed by head counts or using the counters at entrance/exit. Evidence shows that libraries tend to be busiest around lunchtime, although this may well vary at different times of year and on different days, particularly in academic libraries (e.g. if there is a key lecture at a certain time). This information could be used to aid decisions with staffing and where priorities should be at different imes of the day – e.g. shelving, staffing circulation desk, roving enquiries etc.
• Observing age of visitors at a public library service, estimated by front line staff. The library service concerned thought most of their visitors were over 70, but in actual fact there was a wide range across all different age groups, with the most common age group 30-40. This helped shape the future direction of their service. Could also be used to look at gender differences or different demographic at different times.
• Length of time of visit, either by asking people on their exit (although perception may not be accurate) or by issuing slips of paper on entrance to be collected at exit. At a UK academic library, they found that the most visits range from 6 to 20 minutes; taking into account that many visits will have been well over this, there must also have been a lot of very short visits. In this case, the institution needed to make sure the needs of those who visit for only a short amount of time are met.
• Flow from main entrance – where do people go? A study in the academic library showed that the majority of people either went to the main circulation desk (near the entrance) or to the area on the ground floor with journals, book stock and study tables. Very few people visited the enquiries desk or IT desk, demonstrating that staff time may be better utilised by roving in areas of high traffic to assist users at their point of need. A more detailed study looked at how many users were using stock from the library – often difficult to measure if it is not borrowed. Interestingly, they found that the shelves had as much traffic as the IT area which surprised staff.
• Browsing – how do people browse the shelves? Do they suffer from the uncomfortable “browser’s neck”?! Important to make material easy to browse for those not looking for a particular item – use forward facing feature fillers and locate pertinent material at eye level if possible.

Whatever observation you undertake, it is important to have an easy to complete observation chart and ensure all staff observe in the same way.

The talk really highlighted the importance of observation and how such a simple thing can add so much more understanding about your service than just listening to those who volunteer feedback, as this is such a small proportion of your users. Certainly food for thought, and also encouraged me to buy Rachel’s book, The Reader-Friendly Library Service, which is primarily written for public libraries but has a lot which is also applicable to academic libraries. I felt really inspired after Rachel’s talk and hope to suggest some of the observation ideas in my own workplace.

The development of Library 2.0 and the use of Web 2.0 technologies in FE library services

Andrew Eynon, Library Resource Manager at Coleg Llandrillo Cymru, shared the work he has been doing with Web 2.0 and Library 2.0 technologies in FE. I subscribe to Andrew’s blog and follow him on Twitter, so it was good to meet him in person to see the work he has been doing in FE. He even mentioned my blog in his presentation too (thanks Andrew if you’re reading!) but I forgot to give him one of my lovely new Joeyanne Libraryanne cards.

Andrew started the presentation by asking is to discuss in groups the concept of Web 2.0, Library 2.0 and if they are the same thing or fundamentally the same. My group decided that Web 2.0 = user-generated, interactive, read write web; Library 2.0 = use of Web 2.0 in library context. Andrew added his thoughts that Library 2.0 is about the outcomes and processes rather than the tools and technologies.

The project he was involved in aimed to employ a Web 2.0 librarian to support library and teaching staff, discover how Web 2.0 is currently being used, look at the development of Library 2.0 in FE, and develop an online tutorial on Web 2.0 technologies (see presentation for full list of project aims). They also aimed to used these technologies as part of the project (e.g. using a blog to document the project progress).

The main outcomes of the project included a number of useful resources collecting current use of Web .20/Library 2.0, such as the FE Library 2.0 wiki, Library 2.0 in Wales wiki, the Library Web Quest (a staff training tool adapted from the Learning 2.0 programme) and the LibeRaCe blog for Coleg Llandrillo Cymru. Andrew spoke about the different uses of the LibeRaCe blog including lirary news, current awareness, marketing, suggestions, book requests, reference enquiries and a discussion forum. They currently get around 1000 hits per month on the LibeRaCe blog which is great to hear.

It was nice to see so many at the talk discussing the use of Library 2.0; some who are yet to try anything but eager to find out more, others who are experimenting with numerous different uses.

As mentioned in an earlier post, CILIP recently held an Open Session to enable conversation about the use of Web 2.0. Many others have blogged about the event, but I thought I’d add my thoughts too.

I was particularly pleased that in between enquiries and other work-related tasks, I was still able to follow much of the conversation by using Twitterfall to follow any Tweets tagged with #cilip2. As it was an open session, the tag had been promoted before the event and the use of Twitter/live blogging was encouraged. There were some “official” bloggers including Matthew Mezey who blogged about the session on the Update blog. There were also people in the room who were using Twitter to share discussions from the session. There was no live audio or video feed of the event but Brian Kelly reported on how he has learnt from his attempts and this is maybe something that could happen in future.

It was excellent to be able to participate via Twitter despite the geographical spread and it also enabled me to find more librarians on Twitter. The discussions surrounding professional issues (which I followed and participated in on Twitterfall) started well before the event, and it was great to see such a strong community who are passionate about the future of the profession. Dave Pattern produced a list of all the tweets tagged with #CILIP2 and used these to create a Wordle cloud:

#cilip2 Wordle cloud

The actual event centred around the talks from Phil Bradley and Brian Kelly, followed by discussions about how CILIP can utilise and support the use of Web 2.0. I felt honoured to be featured in Brian Kelly’s talk as one of the librarians of the future – he mentioned different Web 2.0 tools I use for professional purposes such as blogging, microblogging and social bookmarking. Both Phil and Brian spoke about how CILIP should be key players in supporting the use of Web 2.0, and I hope CILIP take on board the requests for embracing the technologies. It was also pleasing to hear mention of how CILIP could help explain how and why to use these technologies within libraries and offer support to train staff to enable them to use them in a professional context.

I haven’t heard of any concrete outcomes of the event as yet but the discussion should help shape future CILIP policies hopefully and I think it’s incredibly positive that CILIP are involving members (and non-members) more and hope to see this sort of transparency continues. CILIP are currently involved in a survey on the use of professional networkings and social media websites, I’m hoping this data will also show which areas are currently being used and which could potentially be used.

In related news, I noticed a brief news article in the most recent edition of CILIP’s Library and Information Gazette about the new CILIP communities website which will add social features to the community. It was due to be launched yesterday but wasn’t live when I checked yesterday morning. It seems to be live now however, although I admit I haven’t had much chance to explore it yet. I hope it will be similar in functionality to America’s ALA Connect, which I recently read a review of and sounded great.

Let’s hope this is the start of a more transparent CILIP and a professional body to be really proud of.

I recently found out about this from a recent post on Phil Bradley’s weblog – a list of top tools for learning voted for by learning professionals (also a list of top tools for learners has been added), compiled by Jane Hart.

Phil’s post inspired me to think about what my current top 10 tools are, which I will shortly be sending to Jane who now accepts entries via Twitter.

My tools aren’t in any particular order, it was hard enough to decide on my top ten let alone rank them!

1. WordPress – my blogging software of choice which just gets better and better with each update. I love how easy the admin interface is, and how customisable you can make your page with HTML and CSS. The plugins add extra functionality too such as the WPTouch plugin to create a view for iPhone/iPod Touch. I also use WordPress.com for blogging at work which is really easy to set up and administer.
2. Netvibes – my homepage on all my browsers (I use Chrome, Firefox and Safari at the moment!). It has my key links (I hardly ever use browser bookmarks anymore), my webmail, RSS feeds, and my to-do list. My dashboard to pretty much everything on the web and available wherever I’m accessing the internet.
3. Remember the Milk – I am a listaholic and am obsessed with organising my life with to-do lists. I use RTM for my to-do list at the moment, largely due to the excellent integration with Netvibes and the superb iPhone/iPod Touch app which is free with a premium RTM account. Toodledo is also excellent but I’m favouring RTM at the moment.
4. Google Reader – like Phil Bradley, I used to be a fan of Bloglines, but recently changed to Google Reader and am happy with it. Again the big pull is integration with other systems such as Netvibes and my iPod Touch – I have the Feeds app on my iPod Touch which enables me to sync feeds and then read them offline on my commute to work.
5. Google Search – this is something I hadn’t really thought about until I looked at items others had mentioned. I use Google search numerous times a day, whether it’s for looking up URLs, checking definitions, or trying to find information. I also use Google Scholar sometimes on the enquiry desk, particularly if I’m presented with an unusual enquiry.
6. Twitter – my microblogging tool of choice and one of the main ways of networking with fellow librarians/information professionals. I also use it to keep in touch with some of my family members and friends, and find it an incredibly useful tool for sharing information. I’ve tried a few different tools for updating Twitter and currently use Tweetie on my iPod, Tweetdeck on my home PC, and Twitterfox/Netvibes on my work PC
7. Delicious – I’ve been using Delicious to save useful bookmarks for a while now and although I don’t use it to manage my regularly accessed websites, I do use it to store useful sites I may want to refer to again, and use it to gather useful sites for projects/articles. I’ve also started using Delicious to share websites with students (I’ll write more about this in a blog post soon) I’ve recently tried Diigo although I haven’t fully explored that yet, but it looks very promising.
8. Slideshare – great site for both sharing your own presentations and viewing other’s presentations. I’ve found this particularly useful as it’s being used more widely, and find myself often visiting Slideshare to see presentations of conferences and events I am unable to attend in person. Slideshare has also recently added the facility to upload other documents which I haven’t explored yet but am sure I’ll be experimenting with in future.
9. Google Docs – I’ve only really used this for my own work at the moment (as opposed to collaborative work), but I hope to use it collaboratively in future. I do find it incredibly useful to be able to work on a document from any PC though, as I frequently lose track of which version I have stored on my USB when I’m working at home, work, and on the enquiry desk. The form element in Google Spreadsheets (which I notice Jane has used for the learners vote) is excellent; I recently used this to gather data from different work colleagues in a quick survey format.
10. Fireshot – I struggled to choose between Fireshot, the Firefox screencapture tool, and Adobe Captivate, the screen recording software. I chose Fireshot as I use this most often, whether it’s for screenshots in leaflets/guides, on websites, or even to explain things via email. For a free tool it’s great, and combined with Portable Firefox I can use it on any PC.

What are your top ten tools? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments, or if you are a learner or learning professional why not vote by following the instructions on the website or sending your top ten by Twitter.

A couple of months ago there was a major backlash from the library community in the UK regarding CILIP and it’s use (or lack of) Web 2.0 technologies.

It started with Bob McKee’s All of a Twitter post on his From the Chief Executive’s Desk blog, which was responded to by Phil Bradley in his CILIP – Epic Fail post. There were others who responded either on the original post from Bob (although at the time this was only open to CILIP members, something which had always irked me but has thankfully now been changed, on Phil’s post, on their own blogs, or on Twitter.

It all kicked off one afternoon with many librarians on Twitter joining in the conversation about how CILIP should be supporting Web 2.0 technologies and what they could do to improve things. It was actually quite exciting to be a part of this, and it was great to see a community using social media tools to discuss professional issues.

Thankfully, CILIP were also following what was happening and have decided to begin to tackle the issue by holding an Open Session with the main aim (from the CILIP Council Matters blog post):

to generate some really good ideas about how the Council could be using Web 2.0 to engage better with the LIS community and the individuals in it – both members and non-members

Phil Bradley and Brian Kelly have been invited to start the discussion by speaking about what sort of things have worked elsewhere and suggest ideas that CILIP could try. I’m honoured to have been asked by Brian if he could use me as an example of what people in the community are doing, you can see a draft version of his slides over at his blog.

The actual event is on Wednesday (29th April) in London, and I’m really looking forward to it. I won’t be there physically, but appropriately for such an event there will be people blogging and twittering the event, so I’ll be following the tag #CILIP2.0 (although I think there may be some issues with the tag so it may be #CILIP2 instead). I hope virtual attendees will still be able to contribute to the event, but if there is anything in particular you would like raising, both Phil and Brian have asked for feedback on their recent blog posts.

I for one am certainly pleased that CILIP are taking action, and hope that in the future I’ll be posting about great initiatives that CILIP are getting involved in.

Following on from my previous post about finding people to follow on Twitter, I recently found out about WeFollow, another Twitter directory, thanks to Phil Bradley.

The homepage has the top categories (those with most followers) and lists the top five tweeters/twitterers (not sure what the term would be!) in each category. You can click on the topics on the right hand side of the homepage to find people in different categories, and you can use the search box to find categories which aren’t featured on the front page. You can see a list of librarians currently on WeFollow which ranks them according to the number of followers they have; I’m currently #12.

To add yourself to the directory, just send a Tweet to @wefollow and include up to three areas you would like to be added to. For example, I sent the following message:

@followme #librarian #web2 #university

That’s the basics, although Phil explains WeFollow in more detail in his blog post so rather than repeat it, here’s the link to his post.

Library 2.0 mashup using tags in delicious.com

Following on from a blog post at CILIP’s Library and Information Update blog about a resource produced using tags in delicious, the Department of Innovation, Universities and Skills have re-purposed their initial digitalgovuk mashup and produced a library2.0 resources mashup.

The mashup uses delicious (for the resources), SimplePie (to handle the RSS feed), and Thumbshots (to create the screenshots). The page is automatically updated with anything tagged in delicious with the term library2.0.

I like this idea as a way to present similar resources, although apart from a pretty page it doesn’t add very much functionality to the standard RSS feed you could subscribe to directly from delicious. It would be good if this sort of idea could be developed further to add more features (such as ratings maybe, or rankings for more popular items, or comment ability for each resource, or further categorisation using associated tags). Only the tags at the top of the page in the tag cloud are dynamic, it would be nice if the tags underneath each item were also (I tried to click on one so I’m imagining other people may do the same).

Another issue with this is that there are currently over 70,000 items tagged with the term library2.0 in delicious, many of which may not be relevant; it’s just too general a tag to gain the most from this in my opinion. The concept is good though, and I can certainly see how this sort of thing could be useful when using more specific tags for sharing specific resources.

Kudos to the DIUS Social Media team!

I’ve had a few people who are new to Twitter recently ask me how to find people to follow, so thought it would be useful to share my experiences and also share a new resource I found this morning.

Most of the people I currently follow are either people I already knew were using Twitter (usually via mentioning it on their blog), or people I have found through them. When I first joined Twitter, I used other librarian’s lists to see who they were following. The likelihood is that I might also find some of the people they are following of interest. It’s amazing how quickly you can build up more contacts this way; each new person you follow leads you to a whole new group of potential twitterers to follow. Some of these people I had already heard of but didn’t realise they were on Twitter, others were people I didn’t know but found their updates interesting. I don’t tend to add anyone who has protected their updates unless I know who they are, purely because if I can’t see their updates I don’t know if they are relevant to me.

Since I established a core list of people to follow, I haven’t actively looked for others but if they have added me and I find their updates interesting I have tended to also follow them. I don’t want my Twitter list to become unmanageable so I don’t want to follow too many people and don’t check it often enough to follow those who post very regularly, otherwise I’d get completely swamped in unread tweets.

If you have no idea where to start when finding people to follow, you may find Just Tweet It a useful resource (found thanks to David Rothman)

Just Tweet It screenshot

Just Tweet It is a directory of twitter users categorised into different areas, one of which is librarians. I’ve added myself to the Twittering Librarians directory, and I’ll have to take a look a some on the list that I’m not currently following. There are plenty of other categories so you’re sure to be able to find people to follow from there. I’ll definitely be recommending this resource to anyone new to Twitter looking for people to follow to start them off. It may also be useful to add youself to the directory so that others can find you.

Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a category for twittering libraries (although there are some listed in the librarians directory), but there is a Museums directory.

I’ve been a Twitter user (joeyanne) on and off for a few months now, but have only recently started to use it regularly. It seems to have suddenly become more popular; Stephen Fry talked about it on last week’s Jonathan Ross show, and there’s a video of him talking about twitter on the BBC site which is currently the most viewed video on there.

I’ve personally noticed an increase in use of Twitter recently due to the number of followers I seem to be getting – I don’t have loads but most days in the last couple of weeks I seem to be getting at least one e-mail notifying me of another follower. There’s also interest on the lis-bloggers listserv, this afternoon there have been a number of posts discussing its use within libraries.

Seeing as I haven’t yet written a blog post about Twitter, I thought now might be a useful time to write my thoughts about Twitter as well as explain what it is to those who may not be familiar with it.

What is Twitter?

For anyone who is new to Twitter (there seems to be a lot of people at the moment who are trying to find out more about it and struggling), there’s a useful CommonCraft video called Twitter in Plain English.

If you just want to know the basics I thought it might be useful to outline them here (quite a few of my colleagues have asked me and I found it difficult to explain so this will be a useful exercise for me too!):

• Twitter is “micro-blogging” which is basically a short form of blogging (up to 140 characters per message)
• The main idea of Twitter is to update your current status, the website uses the question “What are you doing?” – this could be things like having breakfast, watching TV, on the way to work etc., or informational posts like sharing interesting links
• A twitter message is called a “tweet”
• You choose to follow other users of Twitter which means that when you go to your Twitter page (be it on the Twitter website, or using one of the many Twitter tools – more on this later) you will see updates from these people
• Other people choose to follow you which means they will see your updates in their own feed
• You can reply publicly to people you are following (this is what it means when you see @ in front of someone’s username e.g. if someone publicly replied to one of my messages it would say @joeyanne and then their message) – this helps other people follow the thread of the conversation
• You can also send direct messages which only the recipient would see
• RT before a message means a re-tweet – sharing a post that someone else has already tweeted

How can I get started with Twitter?

If you want to have a go of microblogging yourself, here’s how I would suggest going about it:

1. Get yourself a twitter account
2. Set up your profile with some basic details and personalise your page (you can follow this tutorial to make a customised screen in PowerPoint but to be honest it’s not really necessary as most people who follow you won’t tend to visit your page)
3. Write your first update to let people know what you are up to
4. Find some people to follow (feel free to follow me if you want to, or add some well known celebrities like Stephen Fry, Jonathan Ross or Alan Carr – you might also find it useful to look who other people are following – e.g. if you are a librarian you might want to follow some of the people I’m following)
5. Integrate Twitter into your workstream – you might want to use the Twitter website but the chances are you will find it much easier if you integrate it with something you already use. You can use your mobile phone to update your status, and if you have an iPhone you can use one of the many Twitter apps such as Twitterfon or Tweetie to update your own status and view updates of those you’re following. If you use Firefox you might want to use an extension like Twitterfox; if you use Facebook you can add Twitter to your Facebook account. There are also a number of gadgets to embed into start pages like Netvibes, or you can download programs to add to your desktop.

Hopefully that’s helped clear up a little bit what Twitter is and how you get started with it.

My own use of Twitter

Personally, I use twitter as a form of networking; I mainly follow other librarians to find out what they’re up to. Sometimes I’ll find an interesting titbit of information about a project they’re working on, or a recommendation of software, or a link to an interesting article, but it’s also quite nice to get to know other librarians in an informal way. I use my twitter feed to notify “followers” of new blog posts (using Twitterfeed), and use my Twitter updates to update my Facebook status at the same time.

It’s also interesting to follow what is happening at conferences you are unable to attend – I have followed a number of US conferences this way, not quite the same as being there but at leats you get an idea of what is happening.

Another use for Twitter is asking for help – this can be useful if you have followers who know a certain location better than you, or if you know people might be able to offer advice about how to do certain things (this is particularly useful if people who are following you have similar software needs, I’ve noticed some librarians using Twitter to get help on their systems). There’s a wealth on knowledge out there which Stephen Fry comments on in his video.

Companies using Twitter

I had an interesting Twitter experience with a company earlier this week. I was trying to find a better way of sharing the layout of one of our rooms in the library on the web (at present you have to download a document). I thought there must be a web program that allows you to design layouts and share them, and thankfully I was right. Floorplanner.com is a program that enables you to layout rooms to scale and add in furniture (this would have been really useful in the past when I was trying to help re-design an office layout). It’s very easy to use so I set up a rough mock up in about 30 mins; then I needed to label the sections (the reason I was trying to do a layout was that we have a collection that is a little unusually arranged at the moment). I added text labels which was fine, but I thought it would be nice to link sections to relevant web pages to find out more information. I tried adding HTML into the captions but unfortunately it doesn’t support HTML links. I posted a tweet asking if anyone knew of a similar program that would allow me to use HTML in the labels, and within an hour got a response from the Floorplanner’s twitter account thanking me for the suggestion and saying they would look into adding HTML support. What a great way of getting customer feedback!

Libraries using Twitter

Following on from that. it makes logical sense that libraries too could benefit from Twitter. There are already some libraries experimenting with using Twitter to update their users on latest news (see Birkbeck for a UK example and a whole list at Twittering libraries here and here), but wouldn’t it be great if we could use Twitter to gain feedback from users and try to act upon it?

I did a search recently for our library and was pleased to see that a member of the public had used our library to study (the person in question was a writer) and commented on Twitter at how she’d found a nice place to study and was impressed with the library. At the time there weren’t many people using Twitter, but I think I will be setting up an RSS feed of a Twitter search for our libraries to see if there are more people mentioning us and see if there’s anything we can act upon to improve our service.

The future?

It seems like Twitter is certainly gaining popularity, there have been more articles in the press about Twitter recently and it certainly seems that some of the more Web 2.0 type companies are using it as a form of communication. It will be interesting to see if it continues to grow this year or if this time next year we’ll all be wondering what the point of Twitter was. Personally, I think it’s a very simple idea and those are the ones that usually succeed. It gradually gained popularity during 2008 (although it wasn’t presented at any events I attended it was usually mentioned informally by either speakers or delegates), and it certainly seems like the “Twitterverse” is growing rapidly in 2009 so far.

I don’t know if it’s something that will become popular in libraries but I can certainly see a use for it in updating users (both by them following the library as well as by publishing tweets to the library homepage for short updates), as well as for getting informal feedback from our users who mention the library of the service they received. Definitely food for thought, particularly as it’s gathering popularity in the mainstream.

Is anyone using Twitter in their library at the moment or know of any good examples of different uses of Twitter? Please share in the comments.