2018-11-16 SPLAT Curiosity Report: Volume 2, Issue 2
Featured Story
Editor’s Note: SPLAT has a couple of openings to fill at the end of 2018. ICfL is currently soliciting applications from individuals working in the Idaho library community to serve a three-year term on SPLAT. We need representatives from all types of libraries, especially school libraries, from throughout the state. To learn more and find out how to apply, see this post on ICfL’s website.
Twitter Intro for Librarians: A Guest Article by Ryan Randall
One of the many great things about our state is the vastness of our farms and forests. Yet with all that distance between Idaho libraries, it can be difficult for library workers to meet each other, learn about new issues or technologies, ask for insight, keep up connections after meeting up at the yearly Idaho Library Association conference, or share photos of our most recent amazing display. Thankfully, many librarians have turned to Twitter. It’s a handy place to connect, and the lack of communication hierarchies makes Twitter particularly accommodating for new library workers. So if you’ve decided to try out Twitter, I have a few tips for how to find other library folks and also how not to be overwhelmed by Twitter’s own vastness.
How do you find librarians who share your interests? As with other social media platforms, the simplest way is to look for hashtags. Many people put hashtags both in specific posts and in their user profiles to make themselves more discoverable. You might, for example, include #makerEd if you’re interested in makerspace education. Hashtags not only make your post or profile easier to find, but also provide handy ways to filter or mute certain terms, which lets them double as a great way to provide content warnings. When a new movie comes out, you can easily mute the conversation around it by writing its name as a hashtag (like #Coco) and then mute that hashtag. For accessibility, using camelCase (dropping the spaces between words and capitalizing each new word) is better than exclusively lowercase hashtags. Screen readers will attempt to pronounce an all-lowercase hashtag as a strange mush of sounds, but many screen readers will pronounce hashtags in camelCase more clearly by separating the sounds with each new capital letter. For instance, #weneeddiversebooks will be smooshed together into a nonsense word, but #weNeedDiverseBooks will be pronounced with its parts more clearly separated. Capitalization also helps sighted readers distinguish the words as well.
Hashtags also make it easier to participate in one of my favorite aspects of Twitter: synchronous chats! Different library workers coordinate a wide variety of chats. Some lively ones include the #critLib chats on critical library work and the #LISProChat chats on many aspects of LIS (even including MLIS programs and the job search). I can’t recommend TweetDeck highly enough for when you’re doing a synchronous chat, since it lets you view multiple columns of messages simultaneously. You can set one to the chat’s hashtag and another to the moderator’s profile, so you can better keep up with the questions and responses of that chat. With Twitter being more than 12 years old, many of the hashtags and chats have gone dormant. P.F. Anderson made one of the most recent lists of hashtags that I could find, and has even organized them in this post from August 2018: https://etechlib.wordpress.com/2018/08/09/library-twitter-chats-collection/ One thing I find particularly useful is following the hashtags of conferences, like #ALAAC18 or #ILA2018. Many conference attendees use Twitter to “live tweet” the sessions they attend, sharing what they find most interesting. So even when you can’t travel to a conference yourself, you can still glean some of the highlights from following along through the conference hashtag.
Once you’ve found a person or three that you want to follow, look again at their profile. It has links that will let you see who they follow and who follows them. This strategy probably is familiar to most people who use any social media, and is certainly how I’ve found some of the people I’ve learned the most from on Twitter. People you might be interested in following might include Emily Drabinski (@edrabinski), the Coordinator of Library Instruction at LIU Brooklyn who’s originally from Boise, Chris Bourg (@mchris4duke), the Director of Libraries at MIT, and Candice Mack (@tinylibrarian), the head of Teen Services at the Los Angeles Public Library.
Okay, let’s fast-forward a few weeks or months. Having found a lot of people and hashtags to follow, what do you do? Oh no: your timeline passes by too quickly to engage! It’s become a monster! The simplest strategy to start pruning back this sprawling goathead is to create lists, which you can set to either public or private. You can also subscribe to other users’s public lists, such as the LIS Journal Club’s OA-LIS-journals list of academic publications in LIS that are fully open access.
Now that you’ve read lots on Twitter, how will you engage with others on there? One thing I’ve noticed that makes Twitter different from Facebook or other social media platforms where most users know you well is that Twitter seems to encourage skimming or short bursts of engagement. It’s smart to write with that in mind. I usually try to think about how something might be misunderstood, particularly by a hangry librarian on their coffee break. So writing for Twitter has given me an opportunity to try to be a little more mindful in how I frame things for people who might not know my exact context or situation. This kind of empathetic, inclusive writing is a great skill for anyone working in libraries to refine!
These are a few tips that I’ve picked up after a few years of exploring Twitter’s vastness. I hope they help you on your journey! You’re welcome to reach out to me on Twitter (I’m @foureyedsoul there), or follow any of the SPLAT team at @SPLATid.
This guest SPLAT post was written by Ryan Randall. Ryan is the Instruction Coordinator & Faculty Outreach Librarian at the College of Western Idaho. When he’s not in a library, there’s a very good chance he’s exploring a local record store, coffee shop, or hiking trail.
Fail Forward
We’ve all been there. You pour your heart into a program, and no one shows up. You try something new, and you fall on your face. Sound familiar? Fail Forward is the place to share your failures, and give you the opportunity to share what you learned from them. Did you promote your program in a different way after no one showed up? Maybe you took a new approach to the new thing you were excited about? Awesome! Share your story via our online form so others can learn, and realize that failure is often part of the process.
When Is a Success a Failure?
Our teen program has lacked in attendance. We ask why that is the case? Teens are busy with school, after school programs, jobs, and life in general. Our last teen program Life Size Angry Birds had 25 people attend. Wow, that attendance is not a failure! The patrons that attended ranged from 5 to 11 years old. Out of the 25 we had two teens at the program. My big question was why? Let’s look at the program. Life Size Angry Birds is fun and everyone who came had fun. The Angry Birds movie and cartoons are geared for a younger age. Teens don’t attend programs for little kids.
I started looking on what is trending for teens and I came across one simple truth if an adult is trying to be hip and trendy for teens it doesn’t work. Best ideas come from teens for teens.
I am a big advocate for Teen Advisory Boards at libraries and letting teens have a voice.
What I learned was Life Size Angry Birds is a good program for children and invite families to come.
Is there a library you follow on social media who is always doing new and exciting things? How about a blog you follow that inspires you in the work you do? Library Crush Corner is a place for those working in Idaho libraries to share what inspires them, and who they’re crushing on… in a professional sense. Share your story via our online form so we can publish it in a future issue!
Lewis and Clark State College
I’ve been crushing on Lewis and Clark State College Library lately, they’re doing some really cool things with the Cricut they got through ICFL’s Make it at the Library STEM Program this past year and they also just got a fun stuffed squirrel as the library mascot! Check their Instagram out @lcsclibrary.
SPLAT explores new ways to build capacity and support library folk as they serve their communities. Library folk throughout the state of Idaho volunteer to serve on the Special Projects Library Action Team (SPLAT). Learn more about SPLAT at splat.lili.org
SPLAT is brought to you by the Idaho Commission for Libraries and is funded in part with a federal grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (LS-00-18-0013-18). The views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this publication do not necessarily represent those of the Institute of Museum and Library Services.