Paul Courant, Twitter

I very much enjoyed last week's talk with Paul Courant, who was surprisingly affable and seemingly very forthright considering the tricky nature of some of the topics we were discussing. It's always nice to be reminded that we're really at the center of a lot of major library action here, where organizations like Google are getting sued and such via projects the University is a major participant in. His reaction to Joanna's incisive question was especially interesting though I wasn't surprised to hear his view that issues libraries like Michigan are facing are basically due to problems with forces outside of academia rather than within academia itself. I do imagine corporations like Sony and so forth do have bigger fish to fry than folks in academia and/or library land. However I do think it's important that an academic library be very cognizant of academic culture and interests affecting thought processes behind certain systems and actions, rather than just painting themselves as bystanders in a world shaped by powers far bigger than themselves.

I'm glad this week's assignment regarding signing on to twitter as I am reluctant to participate more than absolutely necessary is "social media" and this obviously needs to change. To use an SI 500 obsession I guess one reason is just the problem of information overload--I don't use things like google reader or twitter often because I feel I am already bombarded with more than enough information, and I like to think if something is important enough, I will take the time and energy to find it myself. But it not using things like twitter I miss out on a lot of opportunities, and for better or worse I really just need to be tuned into all the major ways people find and share information.

For my tweets, I retweeted blog posts of a librarian I happen to be following who basically does focus on social media like facebook and twitter. Aaron Tay, at musingsaboutlibrarianship.blogspot.com. Of his posts, I found the one listing the most influential libraries on twitter to be very interesting because it was dominated by large public rather than academic libraries. One might imagine academic rather than public libraries should be the most present on twitter or facebook (another post I tweeted had to do with the fact the NY Public was the biggest library on facebook) because of the clientele: college kids should theoretically be the most active on twitter, right? I wonder if it's due to the fact that public libraries often have to scramble the hardest for funding, and so are more active and have been quicker to get onto the web 2.0 social scene? I don't seem to be personally acquainted enough with academic libraries and their digital incarnations to have a very strong opinion on the matter and would appreciate those of others. Aaron has hypotheses, including that public libraries have a larger audience and so are followed more (I don't think this accounts for the discrepancy. There are plenty of academic libraries with huge user bases) or that public libraries are more aggressive in following users. This is really interesting because when thinking about things like Twitter, I always initially think of it as a way for libraries to market themselves and get users' attentions, rather than a way to follow them and get information on them, which is also very important. If nothing else, I'm going to use twitter from that perspective, as I have harped on how public libraries especially need to be extremely and innovatively in touch with the communities they serve.