Twitter; Tagging

Twitter

Although others are enthusiastic about Twitter and the possibilities it offers libraries in communicating with their readers, I have yet to be convinced. I don't find it particularly easy to use and much of what is posted seems to be trivial and of no great interest. I am sure there is a lot of useful information to be gleaned but there also seems to be a great deal of dross to wade through.

In terms of professional development I am sure that it can be a useful way of communicating with other librarians, receiving information from bodies like CILIP etc. It depends how necessary it is to you to have instant access to very brief pieces of information. However, I can see that as an alerting tool, it has its place. As for tweets directed at readers, and in this case I'm considering the users of a Faculty library in Cambridge, I am not sure that such a library has sufficient interesting information to communicate to its readers. For example, the article by Sarah Milstein recommends posting once a day - I think we would be struggling to find enough relevant material to post that often. And it still seems to me that the CamTools pages tailored specifically to the needs of different user groups is a more useful way of communicating with the majority of our readers.

Tagging

Not much to say about tagging - I expect it will prove useful and, as all librarians know, when new subject areas arise, the old terminology doesn't fit any more. Tagging will help to overcome that problem. Every area of knowledge has its jargon with which enthusiasts are familiar and incorporating this as tags will help in accessing relevant information.