Thoughts on Social Media

I know I owe some posts about learning the things a new librarian learns. I do. It turns out, being a new librarian takes up enough time that blogging about it seems excessive. (Go figure.) That said, I did find the time to write an article for NMRT Footnotes about settling in in a new place—I stand by my suggestions, though, if I'd written it a few weeks later I might have done a better job of acknowledging how tough it can be. It's weird to be in a place—and now I mean "place" metaphorically—where you have some new friends you like a lot and are pretty certain you can rely on, but you still feel kind of like you shouldn't, because you're just not sure you've earned the social capital. And you miss your old friends but feel like it's a slight on your new friends to admit it, while talking about how much you like your new friends also feels like a slight on the old ones ... I'm moving way out of librarianship, here, but I imagine any readers who have moved long distances probably have a sense of what I'm getting at. (And any friends no doubt think I'm being silly. I don't think any one of them, new or old, doubts the high regard in which I hold them.) I addressed how to meet those friends, in the article, but not how to really end up integrated, completely, into your new home and social groups. It wouldn't have been that interesting—I'm pretty certain the only thing for it is time.

Which continues to pass. ("Time is marching on, and time is still marching on. You're older than you've ever been, and now you're even older....")

It doesn't help that I have two other blogs. The former is the Moving to Alaska blog, which I nominally share with Dale (he posted once), all about the trip up here and, well, all that stuff I was talking about in the first paragraph—becoming Alaskan, I guess. The second is very my-library-centric. I write it mostly for my coworkers. But if you were really interested in seeing what I'm up to, you'd be welcome to check those out. :D

Excuses aside, I have been thinking. I've composed a couple of blog posts in my head, some of them even about librarianship, but not followed through. I still owe a post about how I think scholarly communication will evolve—at least in the STEM fields—but I'm still rolling that one around.

The thing that brought me to the blog window today, though, was social media. A number of my coworkers seem interested in "this Web 2.0 thing," and I feel like most of them probably participate in some way or other. Some are on Facebook, a few have tried Twitter, nearly all of them read or write blogs... But the thing they lack—and the thing I keep trying to manage for myself—is a method for participating in multiple, but not all, of them sensibly, with as little repeat information as possible. For instance, if all of someone's tweets go to Facebook, why would I be their friend in both places? (Increasingly, the answer is, "I won't.") I continue to passionately hate the posting of piles of Twitter updates to a blog—it's not obviously inappropriate, I suppose, or nobody would do it, but I think it conflates the intended usage of each medium. Either I want to see what you're thinking as you think it—in which case, I will follow your tweets—or I want to see some [more or less] well thought out prose—in which case, I will follow your blog. If you do both well, I'll follow both. But it bugs me to see a bunch of outdated (by the time the harvester puts them on your blog) one- or two-sentence statements where I expect full paragraphs. Maybe I'm getting grumpy in my ... uh, not that old of age, actually. Either way, it's enough to make me unfollow your blog, if you are not in all other ways stunning. The same goes for those awful "feeds"—they may be useful in real time, though I personally just don't care that much about what any one person is doing online—but they are 100% pointless in a blog. If you want to archive that junk, open a blog just for it; don't torture your readers with that inanity, or you'll lose readers.

Wow, feeling a little ranty. Sorry.

I can't control what others do online, but I do have a measure of control of how I interact with it. If a blog becomes a Twitter/stream archive, or if its author is wrong all the time, I unfollow it. If a Twitter account doesn't have enough information or entertainment value, I eventually unfollow it. (I break this rule for friends. I have a couple of friends who post "I ate a sandwich" kinds of things, but I continue to follow them because I like them enough to overlook that.) Similarly, turnabout is fair play: unless you're awesome enough to be worth following with no reciprocation (I'm looking at you, Stephen Colbert), not following me back means, eventually, I'll stop following you.

I've taken to making groups in my Twitter readers, for keeping up with the people whose every tweet I feel like I should read, and I let the rest of it wash by, checking when I have time. I miss a lot—in all honesty, I feel like I'm kind of losing my grip on Twitter, not interacting with more than 10% or so of the people I follow—but I also still gain a fair bit of information, using it that way.

Facebook, I mostly catch up on 2-3 times a day. I try really hard not to send more than 2-3 Facebook updates a day, as well, because I don't want to be annoyingly "noisy" there, in the same way I might on Twitter. It's almost a Twitter "best of," for me.

Meanwhile, my Google Reader is assiduously sorted (though Future Feminist Librarian-Activist should go in "Libraries" half the time and "Social Issues" half the time—and would, if Reader had that kind of granularity in filtering); that is arguably where I'm the most heartless in unfollowing (blogs), because it's impossible to tell who is and is not following your blog; therefore, no hurt feelings. I'm only semi-heartless in unfollowing people who share with me—you have to post a whole lot of irrelevant stuff for me to unfollow you, there, given the ease of scrolling past boring stuff [and my uncertainty in telling whether it's possible to know who is following what you share]—but I'll do it, at need. (Given the number of lolcats I share, I don't feel like I'm justified in being overly judgmental about what others are sharing. ;))

But I'm not sure whether I have an overall "policy" about all of it. Or whether I need one, beyond wanting to be able to explain it, quickly and usefully, to others who want to manage their own social media floods. Frankly, I'm sure I'm not doing it as well as I could be, so I wonder if others have their own policies about all of it, or if everyone flies by the seats of their pants, the way I do. (My social media policy is as disjointed as this post, you could say...)

I'd love to compare notes on all of this, anyway. What do you folks do?

Back in Library-land

Pittsburgh to Anchorage is a long trip—4202.6 miles, to be precise—and I spent pretty much that whole time and, to be honest, the bulk of my first couple of weeks in Alaska willfully ignorant of what was happening in the library world. I marked my RSS feeds "read," ignored my mailing lists, and did the bare minimum, as far as committee work went—though I have some extra to do, to make up for it, now. But I think that break between the overwhelmingness of a 1.5-year crash course in librarianship (I'm counting my pre-library-school information seeking, too, since I got so very wrapped up in it) and, you know, starting work as a librarian was good for me; I'd recommend it to anybody, financial details aside.

But now I'm back and busier than ever! My first day at work as a librarian was Monday, and although I was too tired to blog about it right away, it was excellent. I've learned quite a lot, both about the place where I work and about the technical details of maintaining and upgrading their (our!) Web presence. It's all been pleasantly overwhelming, if that phrasing makes any sense. There's still so much to learn and so much to be done once I have learned (by which I mean, as I am learning) it. But my department—and, honestly, the library as a whole—is so supportive and helpful and willing to answer questions (and, by and large, good at holding back from opening floodgates of things they need the new Web Services Librarian to do for them :)) that, intimidating as the learning curve is, I feel "challenged," rather than "freaked out" or even "stressed." Although it'll be hard work, I definitely feel up to it.

So, I have to say, on the whole, things are good. It may be a few weeks before I go back to exhorting folks to write to publishers, library school deans, or anyone else. ;) But I'll try to keep updating about my experience in starting out as a librarian, starting my work as a liaison to an academic department (and it does look like it'll be engineering, hopefully electrical and computer!), and starting to take on more and more of the technical stuff related to the website.

Sorry if my spelling is not up to par. The dictionary is clearly not installed with Firefox on my Acer...

On the road

As I've mentioned before, I'll soon be driving to Alaska to start my first post-MLIS job. That means very little blogging, here, for at least two weeks. (I'll try to blog every day or so at my blog about the move.) But if 1) I don't pull together the blog post summarizing my Pitt experience and 2) there's no great library-land drama that captures my imagination, I may not actually get around to posting again before I start work, the first full week of October. Then, I imagine, I'll have lots to say.

So, until I return, adieu.

Almost a librarian!

One project stands between me and full librarian status! (Unless you're one of those sticklers who thinks you have to have some number of years in the field, first. But my title, once I start work, will be both Assistant Professor of Library Science and Web Services Librarian--I hope I can put both on my business card :)--so I feel pretty good about going ahead and using the L word.) And I have enough of it done that I could probably turn it in now and graduate. At this point, I'm just trying for the "A."

I have a couple of posts planned--one requires me to steel myself and read the technophobic rantings of the anti-Kindle pro-death-of-trees fringe (I tell myself they're the fringe, but I honestly don't know), and the other is kind of a review of the Pitt library school experience. I'll try to stick to the positive and the constructive, because I see no point in discussing any problems to which I can't offer solutions. Apparently, each graduating student has the right to an exit interview with the Dean of the school; I'm tempted to take him up on that. I have a lot to say.

Anyway, I feel like being finished with classes and within sight of finishing all of my projects is a mile marker, something worth posting about in its own right. I wish I could say I feel jubilant and proud, but all I really feel is exhausted, in debt, and anxious to move on to the next thing. ... Not that that's so very bad a feeling, honestly, because I am so excited about the work I'll get to do, the library I'll work at, the coworkers I'll work with, and the town I'll live in! But there's an awful lot of logistics (and driving!) between me and the start of that job.

As promised...

I'm blogging the move to Alaska: http://movingtoalaska.wordpress.com

If you're more the RSS type, click here to go right to the feed. (You'll miss my cool map, though!)

Good news!

I have a job! (As in, I received and signed an official, printed, mailed job offer today, which I plan to photocopy and mail back tomorrow.) But it's not just any job—it's precisely the kind of job I wanted to be doing, at a dynamic library, in a beautiful city, with excellent coworkers.

I will be working at the University of Alaska Anchorage and Alaska Pacific University's Consortium Library, as a Web Services Librarian. Part of my job will be Web site stuff—making sure the library's home page is working and troubleshooting when electronic resources act up—part will be reference and liaison work, and part will be committee and working group activities. It sounds like there will be plenty of variety to the work, leaving room to fiddle with new and different technologies as time and interest allow. I like my coworkers—they're laid back and fun, but also pretty dedicated librarians, which is exactly the kind of people I want to be working with. And they know I'm not a total genius with all of the development languages in use on their site, yet, which is nice. (I still plan to get a lot closer to genius level before I start work, though.) Finally—and this might sound stupid—I will have a window office. That makes me so, so, so much happier in places like DC and Pennsylvania, so it'll be absolutely amazing in Alaska!

Now, when I tell people about this, I get one of two reactions: "Alaska? Awesome! (Can I come visit?)" or "Alaska? Really? (Bleh!)" Although I really am sad to leave friends and family so far behind, I'm still pretty excited about living in Anchorage: it's a a far sight warmer and lighter in winter than some other parts of the state, and it's a city in its own right—just a little smaller than Pittsburgh. Though moose are not an uncommon sight, even in town. :) And, seriously, I've never been anywhere prettier. There are mountains high enough to have glaciers even in summer, and there's water, and there are state and national parks and forests all around the city—so much to explore!

I've promised to blog the move. If you have a strong opinion about whether I should do that here or make a new blog for it, leave me a comment, but for now, I'm planning to make a new blog and just link it from here and the homepage—keep this blog about librarianship. I'll have some exciting things to write, this year! (You can reasonably expect another post or two about library school before I get to blogging about the new job.)