Twitter

I have to admit, I have always been skeptical about using twitter as a library tool. I completely and totally understand the ways it can be used to collaborate with teachers, administrators, and other librarians, but I have had a hard time accepting that students will willingly follow and respond to tweets from their school librarian. Pam, Brad, Craig, and I were discussing this a little at class on Tuesday. Their ideas were that if you provided some sort of incentive for following the school library's Twitter feed it would prove motivational for students to pay attention to it. I suppose that would work the same with a library Facebook page. I have started following a number of school libraries in the surrounding area as well as the twitter feeds of the blogs I added to my google reader. I have also added some of my classmates library Twitter feeds. I think that Twitter is a great way to share links and information as well as a really awesome forum for figuring out problems in your library and how to address them. One of the ways which I saw this in action was through a blog post by The Mighty Little Librarian about if doing self check outs in her library would be a good idea. She asked other librarians how it was organized and executed in their libraries and got a better idea of how it would work in her own. Another really cool thing that is going on on Twitter is #tlchat, which I assume is teacher librarian chat. Searching using this hashtag allows you to see all the posts that librarians have tagged. It appears that every week they pick a topic for discussion and then tweet about it to each other! What a great way for librarians all over the country to collaborate with each other.