But I’m not a ‘Bot! Hitting the Twitter Limit

Tags

Social media, Twitter

Oh Twitter!  I just discovered (or re-discovered) something irksome about Twitter.  You’re limited to following 2000 people!  It’s an anti-spam measure.

I probably knew about this when I started tweeting, but then it seemed unimaginable to me that there might be 2000 accounts worth following and I thought no more of it.  But I’m following 1500 or so with my main professional account @speccollbrad already …

Robot from smaedli’s flickr stream (license CC BY 2.0).

Seems to me that this limit is too low given the way Twitter has grown since it was set.  Anyone who like me is actively using Twitter for professional awareness and has interests in several areas will hit this limit at some point.  I don’t believe it’s beyond the wit of Twitter to devise ways of spotting spamming (churn etc) that wouldn’t hinder users who are making the most of the service in legitimate ways.

Now actually I rarely look at my main account stream – I use lists to curate what I really need to see.  But following is part of the reciprocity of Twitter.  If someone follows me and appears to be human* I will follow back – it is polite.  Not to mention that a) a lot of people get offended by people unfollowing them and b) the number of followers is often used as a measure of Twitter success (it isn’t, necessarily, but it’s easy to measure) and a great way to get people to follow you is to follow them.

So what to do?  Well, I will be a little more strategic about following e.g. weeding out dormant accounts from time to time and thinking a little before I follow.  But I don’t want to devote much energy to this.  There is a more positive way forward.  If you get more followers, Twitter ups the limit.

So, the answer, as usual with Twitter and other media really, is to post interesting stuff and engage with people – which will bring its own rewards.  Not just in the numbers, but in the value of sharing information and experience, which is after all why I use Twitter in the first place.

*actually robots, aliens, ghosts, spaceships etc are fine too.  Just not spamsters.

PS Thank you to Diane Shaw @museocat whose recent tweets about hitting the limit prompted me to look into this.  @Citizenwald is also on the 2000 limit.  You might like to follow them both if you’re interested in special collections – both great tweeters.

BTW, I bumped into the max 2000 following limit on twitter this past week, so had to unfollow lots of inactive accts. Very annoying.

— Diane Shaw (@Museocat) May 13, 2013

2000 following limit is sad when so many new museum/library/cultural heritage-related accts are being created. @citizenwald @speccollbrad

— Diane Shaw (@Museocat) May 13, 2013

Five Theses on the Future of Special Collections

Reblogged from The Special Collections Handbook:

"Preservation without use is an empty victory. It ought to be our primary purpose at all times to minimize barriers to use ..."

" crucial to reach out and demystify special collections, to convey the message: 'Please touch. This is here for you. You are special enough for special collections'."

So says John Overholt in a provocative conference summing up*.  He believes that the future for special collections must be about openness (setting texts free to be transformed) and advocacy (demonstrating that they are central to mission and relevant to students).

Read more… 234 more words

You say KILIP, I say SILIP (or is it CHILIP?)

Tags

Advocacy, Campaigns, CILIP, Librarians, Libraries, Marketing, Media

Hooray! CILIP* is to rebrand and, above all, find a new name.

Names matter. We are in incredibly difficult times for libraries, higher education and public services.  Librarians and library users need a professional association which can reach out to and influence decision-makers, the media, the public.  A convoluted name and a meaningless and unmemorable acronym which can be pronounced in at least three ways make this more difficult than it needs to be.

The issue is not just a concern for CILIP HQ.  A difficult name makes things more difficult for activists and other members.  As a CILIP Rare Books Group Committee bod, I’ve found the name a burden when organising conferences and events and chasing payments.

I really hope we get something with Library or Librarian in the name.  To explain what CILIP is, I often end up saying, “It used to be the Library Association”, which works!  The words mean something to almost everybody – can’t think of anyone who wouldn’t have some concept of a library or librarian.  The difficulty (which led to the original problematic name) is what to do with the “Information” side.  And does “Knowledge” have to be in there somewhere now?  I’d say those are part of librarianship, but I imagine the many members who work outside traditional library posts may disagree.  It will be interesting to see how it goes!

*For non-librarians, it’s the organisation that used to be the Library Association.

On Conferences, and similar things (Thing 15, part 1)

Tags

23 Things, Conferences, Skills, Training

I am going to try to squish twenty-plus years of going to, speaking at and organising library conferences and events into this post.  Oh, can’t be done – I’ll split this into three posts instead.

1. On Going to Conferences

There is nothing to beat a really good conference or training event: to learn new skills, to find inspiration, or to build a sense of professional community.  I still remember the first rare books conference I attended, in 1996: all about amazing book bindings, at Durham – we stayed in this castle!

Durham Castle, from Squirmelia’s flickr stream, licence CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

The factors that make great events are not exactly earth-shattering.

There’s the content of the event – what it’s about, how it’s covered, who is doing it.  Above all, presenters or teachers with expertise, enthusiasm, understanding of the audience, and the presentational skills to convey these things.  Good organisation helps too.

However, I’ve found value even in events where some speakers weren’t great, or that were badly organised.  This is because the very best thing about conferences is the networking.  Special collections librarians and archivists are often solo workers or the only one of their kind in a larger library.  How lovely to spend time with other people who understand, have same problems and share ideas!  Yes, social media is brilliant, but you can’t be completely candid about your problems in a public forum.   And it’s so much nicer to deal with people online once you’ve met them in real life.

I was all set to give some tips about attending conferences, but these from Joeyanne seem to say it all.  Especially the bit about travelling light!

These days I can’t write about conferences without mentioning the funding problem.  Training budgets are squeezed or non-existent if you are lucky enough to have a job – particularly if you are on a short-term contract.  While I was CILIP RBSCG Treasurer there was a noticeable rise in people who had jobs but were paying for their own attendance at conferences and even day events which one would see as directly relevant to the job e.g. cataloguing.

Getting funding is about looking for bursaries (many big conferences offer these) or making a case to your employer (if you have one) that what you want to attend is relevant and will help them.  If you speak at a conference, you should get travel expenses and often a free place.  There are many networking and training events which are free or cheap for delegates, such as the Library Camps.  I’m not saying it’s easy – it’s not!

What about when you get back?  It’s all too easy to chuck notes and bag in a corner, mean to revisit the ideas later, but then to be overwhelmed by the day job and lose all that momentum.  I’ve found that blogging very soon after if I can, and reading blogs by other delegates helps with this – I wonder what others have found?

 

Social media use in archives and special collections: 2012 survey results!

Reblogged from Ex tabulis:

This past summer I completed an independent study on how archives and special collections use, could use, and should use social media. As part of the class, I sent out a survey asking archivists and special collections librarians how their repository uses these platforms (or why they choose not to use social media). I received 185 results from institutions all across the spectrum - large, small, academic, corporate, religious, etc.

Read more… 184 more words

Interesting survey - on a subject very dear to me, as you can probably tell from this blog!

Decisions, Decisions: helpful concepts for collecting decisions

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Archives, Collecting, Collection development, Collection management, Policies, Rare Books, Special Collections, Strategy

I wanted to share with you two ideas that have really helped me in writing a new edition of our Collection Development Policy for Special Collections at Bradford (which will be online in due course when agreed).

J.B. Priestley thinking hard, at his typewriter in a Moscow hotel in 1945. Part of our J.B. Priestley Archive, a collection which is unique and distinctive and very definitely Heritage.

Collecting decisions are the most important decisions in Special Collections – if you take something, you are committing resources to it indefinitely. If you don’t take it, there probably won’t be a second chance. Also, it is becoming more and more important to collect in a strategic way. We increasingly must account for our use of physical space and staff resources.  This use becomes more noticeable as print collections are managed down.  Digital records will have to be collected pro-actively, by working with creators as they create: this is timeconsuming and must be justified.

So, any ideas that help us make and justify decisions are worth exploring.

Unique and distinctive
I increasingly use these terms to explain “Special Collections”. They explain what is “special”. The terms move us away from talking about market value and age as measures of “specialness”.  These may explain why things should not be on open shelves, but don’t explain why we are keeping them and investing in them.  Instead, “unique and distinctive” help us to think about the subjects and nature and qualities of the objects in collections and their role within those collections.  They also help us look beyond the silos of archives/libraries/museums to understand the common qualities of heritage materials and their management.

The “Leeds typology”
I borrowed a typology used by Leeds University Library for their stock and tweaked it to meet Special Collections needs.

• Heritage. Unique and distinctive collections which are your stars, the ones that you are uniquely placed to nurture, the ones that have a resonance with your organisation, its region, and its subject strengths. Examples from Bradford include J.B. Priestley, the University’s own history, and our collections around nonviolence and peace campaigning.
• Legacy. Unique and distinctive collections you might not accept now, that fall outside your core, BUT that are useful and are justifying themselves. We have several small, catalogued, well-used collections of this sort that we are happy to keep but we won’t invest in developing them further.
• Self-renewing. Material that is collected because it is useful now to staff and collections users, and that will ultimately be replaced when no longer of use. Reference books, manuals, standards, textbooks, bibliographies etc.  Self-renewing is a very small proportion of our Special Collections: I think we have about 2 shelves worth out of 1.5 km!
• Finite. Material that is not or is no longer relevant. We aim to deaccession as much of this as we possibly can. Obviously how one goes about this depends on whether it is unique and distinctive or not.

The typology is proving useful not only for collection management.  For example, it is helping us to set salvage priorities and to direct staff learning (i.e. new Special Collections staff are expected to become familiar with all our heritage clusters but not necessarily all our legacy or other collections).

Archival Encounters III: this time it’s digital

Tags

Archives, Digital Collections, Digitisation, Heritage, Seminars, Special Collections, University of Leeds

A golden rule of professional blogging: if you go to an event, blog about it that day,  or maybe the next, or at least that week – otherwise you will either forget or never get round to it.

When I say “you” of course, I mean “I”.

Sometimes, though, the organisers will post the presentations or someone else will blog, which is nice cos you can just link.  Like this!  Archival Encounters III: summary and presentations.

Heavy rain in Sydney, 1935, from the flickr commons stream of State Library of New South Wales. Chose this because a) lovely example of the way digitisation brings difficult bulky formats like glass plate negatives to new audiences b) event was on a wet day and c) the umbrella lady looks sooo fed up.

The event, on 4 February, handily brought together archive professionals, community projects and interested academics to discuss the implications of digitisation.  It is one of a series of such things organised by the Centre for Collaborative Heritage Research, initially as I understand it to bring academics and others together at the University of Leeds but now open to all.  I think the series is a very good idea, cutting across silos of “library”, “gallery”, “department” etc to find and share common interests, particularly helpful in a University the size of Leeds.

I’m afraid it was such a wet and windy day that I spent most of the early presentations trying to warm up and dry out and I had to leave before the end, so I can’t give a detailed account of each paper.  However, the speakers confirmed my overall impression of digitisation now.  It’s core business, what we do all the time, not an add-on.  Organisations are looking at it in a strategic way, finding good partnerships (often commercial), and not expecting to get it all done by some wonderful big grant (though must mention the way AHRC are supporting fantastic boutique projects involving academic research).

Serendipity, or, Why There's No Such Thing as a Waste of Research Time

Tags

Archives, Digital cameras, Preservation, Research, Serendipity, User services

Reblogged from Library Marginalia:

Today my main goal is to complete the marking of the Historical Bibliography essays submitted a week and a half ago, and I am rewarding myself (and keeping my focus) by breaking after every four essays and sorting through some of the extra research photos I took in Oxford a couple of years ago.

What do I mean by "extra" photos?

Read more… 487 more words

Great example of archival research in action: the value of a negative finding (students are often deterred by this when new to research, but it's all part of the process) and the role of serendipity. This finding of linked and useful things is a really important by-product of many visits to Special Collections.

Too Many Collections, So Little Time?

Reblogged from The Special Collections Handbook:

Are you struggling with increasing numbers of users, demand for digital, crumbling collections, unsuitable storage space, intellectual property conundrums, born-digital collections, lack of skills, pressure of public sector cuts and recession ...?  You are not alone!

Two essential new reports reveal the challenges faced by UK special collections and archives and give us the evidence we need to seek improvements, whether in our own organisations or collectively.

Read more… 270 more words

Two eagerly awaited publications. I'll be writing more about both soon once I've had chance to digest.

Reflections on the Loss of Historic Manuscripts

Tags

Digital Collections, Digitisation, Disasters, Libraries, Mali, Manuscripts, Preservation, Timbuktu

STOP PRESS 31 January: fantastic news from a credible source: this blog post from the Tombouctu Manuscripts Project says that although there was damage there does not seem to have been a fire at all and the manuscripts are safe.  Which just goes to show how difficult it is to get reliable information during conflict situations.  The news story and the way it spread also shows that people do care about heritage – the burning of manuscripts is a major news story.  I hope all this has raised awareness of these amazing resources and the work this Project and others are doing to protect and digitise them.  I’m not removing the original post because, even though these particular manuscripts are probably OK, the wider points about the vulnerability of heritage objects and the need to digitise them effectively are still true.

STOP PRESS 30 January: according to the BBC and Time and much discussion across the twittersphere, it looks as though the loss may not be quite so bad as feared, thanks to efforts by Timbuktu’s people to protect their heritage.  Maybe 2,000 rather than 30,000 items may be lost.  More news is emerging: I’m keeping an eye on it via twitter (hashtags #timbuktu and #manuscripts).

A story in the news today that puts other threats to heritage in perspective: the burning of a library in Timbuktu containing thousands of ancient manuscripts. In this excellent and insightful blog post, Simon Tanner of Kings College tells us the story of the institution, New Ahmed Baba Institute, and its manuscripts and people.  The institute was set up “to promote the conservation, research and promotion of the manuscripts as African heritage”, using them to bridge the gap between scholarsjip on Islam and on Africa, and to raise public awareness of Timbuktu’s incredible history as a centre for trade and ideas.

Dr Tanner, who has advised on digitising African manuscripts, then reflects on the digitisation of African heritage: how digital collections are created by the ideologies of those funding and selecting them.  The same problem is faced by any institution seeking to digitise, but is greatly magnified in this situation.

As noted in the blog, the shock of such events is a reminder of just how fragile heritage (and human life) are, so vulnerable to war and conflict.  At least digitisation may mean that such events in the future do not result in total loss of  heritage: after all, lots of copies keeps stuff safe (safer, anyway).