Thing 12: Social Media

Response time goes from days to seconds.

In upstate New York, we felt a bit of Tuesday’s 5.8 earthquake that was centered in Virginia – a distance of about 500 miles.  If this has happened 50 or even 20 years ago, we would have read about it in the newspaper (remember newspapers?) or that night’s news broadcast.  This week though, when we felt the quake in our office, we were able to go online and people were tweeting about it in the same amount of time that it took for the quake to happen.

Libraries are information centers and as such we are able to find information about current events as they happen.  In recent disasters, most notably  in the days and weeks after Hurricane Katrina, local libraries were a place to get information on government assistance and send emails to family members to update them on how they were doing and where they were staying.

For this project, I feel some camaraderie with others working through the 23 Things even though I’m physically very far removed from the librarians working on it as the majority seem to be in the UK.  Reading through their blogs, I find myself nodding in agreement with their observations on each Thing.

While we haven’t used social media for professional development, we have used to for Readers’ Advisory.  We promoted a special event for our Facebook friends and then invited them to post on our wall the last three books that they had read and enjoyed, and we gave them the title of the next book to read.  We started with one event; with the Adult Services librarians working together to come up with the titles, and plan on repeating it as it was fun for the librarians and the patrons really enjoyed the choices that we recommended to them.