I Keep Running Out of Characters

Like everybody else, I signed up for Twitter last week in order to have something to write about in this blog post. To be honest, I had a twitter account even before this, but I had used it a total of two times-- once to post something to the display in the SI lounge and once because I thought, like Facebook, you needed an account in order to access other people's comments/tweets. This is the first time I've actually explored any of the features. The first thing I noticed: its really hard to say something substantive in 140 characters! I kept running out and then having to go back over my tweets and either abbreviate words or take out whole phrases. I also didn't know that hashtags and other users' names counted towards this limit so I'd go right up against the wall and then remember that I had to include #si643. I also wasn't entirely certain what the content of my tweets should be. I mean, the famous people that I started following apparently have no problem telling the world about their illnesses or cursing their spellchecker, but surely if this is an assignment, I should be discussing weighty matters of professional practice? Not so! After ten minutes on Twitter, I now know that where my classmates will be spending their Sundays, what their opinions are on April Fools Day jokes, and how much they love flossing (actually, I don't think the last one had an SI hashtag, so it probably doesn't count).

Visiting the links that everybody's been putting up has been fun, although this format kind of feels like an expanded version of si.all. The jury's still out on whether I would use twitter regularly in my library career but I did just recommend the other day that my pastor (who's a total Facebook addict) use it to get the word out on her service opportunities and study sessions. Generally, this format--tweets generated by an organization instead of an individual-- seemed more useful to me. As celebrities tweets are constantly getting them into trouble and judging by the amount of personal information I've seen posted in my network, it seems that people have a hard time fully understanding just how public their random thoughts will become when they hit the "tweet" button. Twitter accounts controlled by  so-and-so's marketing department, on the other hand, really get that they represent the public face of the company/institution/organization they're tweeting about, which tends to make their posts both more boring and less trivial.

As for class last week, I quite enjoyed the heated discussion on embedded librarianship. I agree that this really is an issue more of use to academic libraries than public ones, but it was still interesting to hear about different people's opinions. I'm still not convinced that sending a librarian with a physician to do rounds is going to make much of an impact unless said librarian also has a medical degree, but I can also see where it would be of great benefit to specialized collections and insular academic communities such as a music library or business school. Also, I agree with Kristen that the book club assignment was more geared in our (prospective public librarians') direction, so everything balances out.

Even though Courant already presented in SI 500 and we had to read one of his articles for class, I really enjoyed him taking the time just to answer questions. People came up with some really interesting ideas, and he had really interesting answers. Its obvious that he's thought about all this stuff in depth and has formed deep opinions about how to keep libraries viable. Also-- the Espresso Book Machine is AWESOME. 'nuff said.