And also Cam23 Thing 2: Blogs and social media

I have talked about my relationship with blogging in the CPD23 first post; and I have partially covered social media in Cam23 Thing 1 (see the paragraph about my scattered brain!). I’ll just add that I tend to use Facebook for personal reasons, and Twitter for professional reasons. I’m working my way around LinkedIn. I am a huge fan of Flickr, first because I love photography, and second because it allowed me to set up a beautiful image library for my department (password-protected too – I’d love to show it to you). Twitter was difficult at the beginning – it takes time to adapt to that kind of communication.

My idea is that technology, and all things technology, make sense as long as you use them in a healthy way – whatever healthy might mean for you. For me, it means that every now and then I have to switch off (maybe because I remember living without all this stuff, and even without mobile phones! Eeek!).

Also, from a librarian’s perspective, I think we need to communicate with our users. If our users communicate on Facebook, and we want to talk to them, we need to be on Facebook. If they all move to Twitter, let’s go Twitter then. If some of them are here, and some there, let’s be in both places. Basically, we need to be everywhere our "clients" are. And as long as I get somebody through my library’s doors, I will provide materials on paper – physical stuff for them to interact with.

Hopes for Cam23: getting more involved in the Cambridge library community. I know some of you in person already, and I look forward to meeting the others (personally and/or virtually).

See you next week!