Friday 11 February 2011

Twitter and Facebook

Facebook and Twitter are really useful tools and have been part of my world for some time now - but both serve different functions.

For me Facebook is used for more personal things - keeping up to date with friends and family around the country/ world and less for professional things. I do lock down a lot of my content and make it hard for people to find me via searches. Having said that I have set up a CILIP Career Development Group West Midlands group page and I also 'like' various library related pages including the University of Warwick Library and Research Exchange pages. Having news come to me here is useful - although I would not necessarily engage with the content here.  

Twitter on the other hand is a different beast! I use it professionally and have found it really useful in engaging with fellow Librarians and keeping up to date with the latest news. I first joined several years ago - and was pretty clueless as to what to do and who to follow. But it did not take me long to find lots of fellow Librarians out there. The resource is great for sharing ideas, finding out about new ideas and resources from elsewhere and meeting fellow library people from around the country and the world. When I am working on a new project or want some ideas of possible tools that could be used etc. I simply post something on Twitter and more often than not someone answers with something useful.

Twitter is also great for promoting things - I used it to publicise the 'Librarians as Teachers' event last year. I also incorporated Twitterfall into the event to enable people who were unable to attend to be involved. In addition I have also followed tweets from people at various events when I have not been there - it is a great way of finding out what is being said. More recently through running generic sessions in the Library - it is interesting to see the increased power of Twitter in promoting these sessions. In several instances this resource is proving to be popular for students to get information about Library events. Twitter has certainly opened up a new world for me - and I would definitely recommend it to other people.


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