shelfless

I think it’s good to know what the story people create around your institution is. So, I’ve been following Northwestern University Library around. Listening in on the public social chatter to hear what the people are saying. Or at least I’ve been trying to. The truth of the matter is the chatter was rather quiet.

It could be that I hadn’t been following the right sources. That’s a distinct possibility. My focus was through Twitter, Flickr and Technorati for the most part. Technorati was a complete bust. Despite the high maintenance required too keep up with searches that yielded zero results my efforts there were for naught.

Flickr wasn’t quite as bad, but wasn’t all that good either. People find the library photogenic. There are a number of lovely pictures of the architecture inside and out. And there was some photos from a fancy dinner. What there wasn’t was dialogue.

So… on to Twitter. Twitter had better results. There wer no flood gates, mind you, but there was a trickle. Every few days on of the feeds would produce a little something. Some were humorous, if disconcerting. They even had occasional posts that were definitely worth the staff here looking at.

If one person has a thought that they tweet, it’s probable that there are a number who don’t know, want to know, but haven’t said anything. How great would it be if the library were monitoring these feeds and responded, much in the same way many commercial companies seem to be.

There were two exciting developments over the time I started to monitor the library through twitter. The Core Library started to twitter with some encouraging results. The main library has also seemed to refresh it’s approach to the medium. Here the maintenance has slow goings, but it’s starting to happen.

Things are starting to happen. I worked with a co-worker this week going over Twitter and Facebook and RSS feeds, and discussing how they might be applied to the collections she maintains. I don’t expect magic to happen over night. All these steps add up though. It’s exciting to see people not just starting to take part, but wanting to.