- Websites and blogs of reviewers
- Websites and blogs of publishers
- Websites and blogs of authors
- Websites and blogs of booksellers
- Websites and blogs of libraries
- Websites and blogs of friends....
Then there is Facebook, various book and library forums, wikis, and other community locations where people can share their opinion about books.
But what about Twitter? Is this is a useful resource for collection development? You might be asking if you should invest your time in this social media tool to assist with your work. Is it worth while? My answer to this, like other information sources, is it depends.
Twitter for me is like an ESPN highlight tape of the baseball games played last night: brief exciting moments, lacking the context which to me is the ultimate beauty of the art form, but offering enough pizzazz to get one interested. And because I love baseball (and books), I like this stuff.
If you want to explore Twitter to see if it can support your work here are a few suggestions.
- First off, signing up is easy and free. You can do that at http://twitter.com
- Choose to follow individuals and organizations that you feel will offer authoritative information to assist with your work. This could be @goodreads, @PublishersWkly, @sljournal, @ALA_Booklist, @HornBook, or individuals like @joycevalenza or @CynLeitichSmith
- When you go to someone's Twitter page, read the description they gave for their work. Also look over their recent Tweets, and see if these bits of information resonates with your needs. If it sounds appealing, then follow them.
- Once you are on someone's Twitter page that meets your needs, see who else they follow (or who else follows them). You'll probably find people you also want to follow, and they might even follow you... and so forth.
- You get up to 140 characters of information.
- It starts blank. 140 characters to go.
- Text. This should be snappy and intriguing -- and don't expect it to contain the book title or the authors' name, because those can take a lot of characters.
- Use lots of shortcuts and don't worry about using proper sentence structure. Writing Tweets reminds me of how I text on a phone -- using as many shortcuts as possible (so that I don't have to keep thumbing my way through a thought).
- Link. You should know that this takes a minimum of 12 characters, but links usually are 20ish characters long. If you see something called TinyURL or bit.ly, these are free services that can shorten a long web address to a 20ish character link.
- Hash tags. You'll see #TEXT within many Tweets. These are searchable tag fields, enabling users to find all relevant tweets for specific issues or gatherings. For example, #tla11 will be on all tweets that are relevant to the Texas Library Association 2011 conference. For children's books, my favorites are: #kidlit #yalit #reading #books #writing #poetryfriday #poetry #childrensbooks
Summary: Twitter might help you learn about articles and resources on the Web that can support your collection development, but I doubt you'll get enough information on Twitter itself.
To end, here are a few quotes about Twitter that I culled on April 5, 2011 from http://www.neatorama.com/2009/07/15/10-quickie-quotes-about-twitter/
"oh this is going to be addictive" - Dom Sagolla, Twitter co-creator
"The qualities that make Twitter seem inane and half-baked are what makes it so powerful" - Jonathan Zittrain, Harvard law professor and Internet expert (Source)
"Using Twitter for literate communication is about as likely as firing up a CB radio and hearing some guy recite 'The Iliad.'" - Bruce Sterling, science fiction writer and journalist (Source)
"Whoever said that things have to be useful?" - Evan Williams, Twitter co-founder and CEO
"HI TWITTERS . THANK YOU FOR A WARM WELCOME. FEELING REALLY 21st CENTURY" - Oprah, yes that Oprah, on Twitter
Final thought: Feel free to follow my Tweets --- @TeachingBooks
No comments:
Post a Comment