This article was downloaded by: [Simon Fraser University]On: 20 November 2014, At: 03:01Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH,UK

Journal of Electronic ResourcesLibrarianshipPublication details, including instructions forauthors and subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/wacq20

Rocking in the Tree TopsJill Emery aa University of Texas at Austin Libraries , Austin,TexasPublished online: 23 Jun 2009.

To cite this article: Jill Emery (2009) Rocking in the Tree Tops, Journal of ElectronicResources Librarianship, 21:2, 110-113, DOI: 10.1080/19411260903035791

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Journal of Electronic Resources Librarianship, 21: 110–113, 2009Copyright C© 2009 Taylor & Francis Group, LLCISSN: 1941-126X print / 1941-1278 onlineDOI: 10.1080/19411260903035791

A VIEW FROM THE GRID

ROCKING IN THE TREE TOPS

Jill Emery

It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information.—Oscar Wilde

The latest grid craze is Twitter, a free, micro-blogging site wherein entriescan be only 140 characters long. Http://www.twitter.com Entries, knownas tweets, provide status updates, immediate thoughts of authors, and/orreviews of lectures, movies, songs, and the like. Tweeters can also post linksand photos along with their statements. It requires an amount of precisionand succinctness not found in blog entries or other social networks. Thereis no game playing or some of the other social-networking distractionsoffered such as list making or survey taking. It is both a push and pulltechnology in that you can feed information into Twitter from other socialnetworking applications and blogs or vice versa. It is the brevity of the postsand the relative ease with which tweets can be made from both hardwareand mobile devices that make this the fastest-growing networking site onthe grid. Numerous people are starting Twitter accounts just to see what allthe media hype and fuss is about and, though many of these accounts arenot maintained after an initial exploration and the ready uptake does notalways occur, there are a growing number of regular users who are findingdifferent applications of this tool daily.

Twitter provides rapid information in a short form, and it is extremelyeasy to follow the updates of others because of myriad software applicationswith which it works on both mobile devices and traditional computinghardware. Currently, most academic librarians are using Twitter primarilyas a tool at library conferences and seminars to capture short speakersnippets to share with colleagues both in attendance and not in attendance

Jill Emery is Head of Acquisitions at the University of Texas at Austin Libraries, Austin,Texas. E-mail: j.emery@austin.utexas.edu

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Rocking in the Tree Tops 111

at a meeting. Public and school librarians are using Twitter to push peopleto their Web sites and to provide up-to-date information regarding theirprograms and events at their locations. Given the novelty of this technology,it has many champions, but it also has a number of cynics and critics. Thequestion is whether this is a tool that will retain staying power and whatapplications of it will survive into future iterations.

Though Twitter does have incredible uptake, with more than 14 millionusers reported in April 2009, the critics point out that 60% of users do notreturn after creating an account. It does take some skill and understandingto utilize tools such as Twitterfeed to set up exchanges between blogsand Twitter. However, most established social-networking sites such asFacebook do have relatively easy connection into and out of Twitter. Havingto use outside tools may cause some of the lack of uptake, but some criticsfeel that the lack of uptake is occurring because individuals do not want tolimit themselves to conversations held in 140 character increments. Othersfeel the lack of staying power is caused by the blend of both serious and“entertainment” elements that can be followed simultaneously. Others citethis blended conversation experience between both entertainment figuresand field experts as the exact reason for why Twitter is so popular at themoment. All agree that the availability of this tool for free on mobiledevices make it quite attractive and easy to use. In the mobile environment,long blog posts and paragraphs of text are either tremendously difficult toread on devices or else take quite a bit of scrolling to get through whentext can be expanded to a suitable viewing level. It is truly a tool whoseutilization is optimized with a small viewing screen in mind and the imagerenders quite readily on mobile devices.

So far in the library world, some of the most successful uses of Twit-ter have focused on pushing information about the library out into theTwitter-o-sphere through posts regarding events programs and local li-brary information. For the truly savvy librarians using Twitter, some ofthese information snippets do help pull patrons and users back into thelibrary for these items or at least drive users and patrons to their Websites. There have also been reports made of libraries using Twitter to per-form informal community surveys on program and hour needs of theirpatrons. The use of Twitter to pull patrons into an engaging library com-munity conversation could be developed further. For instance, a friendsgroup could use Twitter to discuss various community-oriented topicswith a broader base of the population. Twitter could be employed bybook clubs to have concise discussions about the readings occurring. Lo-cal authors could post weekly discussion topics on their favorite books orauthors. The various discussion topics that could be engaged seem end-less, and yet libraries and librarians seem reluctant to take these steps intoengagement.

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112 J. Emery

Part of the issue probably lies with the responsibilities of ongoing com-munication and oversight of such programs. In these economically pressedtimes, can libraries afford to have one professional overseeing online con-versations with patrons? How does the administration determine who thatindividual will be, and do special contracts need to be signed or waiversput into place to allow for an individual to have this “authority” within theorganization? From the administrative and organizational standpoint, thereare many questions to be considered as is the need to discuss the level ofcontrol or ownership a library or librarian wants to take to participate inthis manner with their patrons and end-users. Policies regarding the uses ofTwitter have yet to be formalized and presented to the library communityat large, but many libraries are exploring the different possibilities of theutilization of this tool.

Other uses of Twitter that have caught on and are becoming increasinglypopular within the library community are the utilization of this tool by in-dividuals at library conferences and meetings to capture salient points pro-vided by speakers and to push overview information of the events to blogs.Generally these are attendees using either mobile phone devices or laptops.Using a capability known as hash-tagging, individuals micro-blogging anygiven event can have their threads pulled together and reviewed as a set of“conversations/discussions” on any given event. This form of informationprovision is becoming increasingly important to a library professional fieldthat depends heavily on regular attendance at given library events to staycurrent on trends and information within the profession. As travel fundingdwindles, more and more librarians are depending on those individuals ableto travel and attend these events to report out or back to the community atlarge. Twitter provides an excellent medium for reporting back and is madereadily available to listeners most often in real-time reporting scenarios. Itcan be argued that this single use of Twitter has become indispensable tothe library community at large.

In addition, many library organizations and library publications havecreated Twitter profiles to entice members/subscribers, to spread infor-mation about given organizations or publications, and to provide anotherconduit into their Web sites and publications. There are set groups formingdaily around both professional activities and personal interests, so thereis a healthy librarian “twibe” and a publications “twibe” to be explored.Furthermore, there are also mechanisms to tag any given Twitter accountwith three to five meta-tags to help better identify the value of your accountto users. Many are starting to follow others using this tagging system as aguide.

One Web blogger refers to Twitter as the ultimate note-taking tool. Iagree somewhat with this statement. Note taking is a strong component ofthis application owing to the character limitation. However, Twitter goes

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Rocking in the Tree Tops 113

beyond just noting facts such as a liking for bacon or current travel woes.Twitter is the beginning of an online conversation with multiple listeners,many of whom will remain happily quiet and observant of the conversation.However, some listeners/readers of tweets will feel compelled to respondand participate in an open conversation. This ability coupled with the readyavailability of the tool on mobile devices makes this application somethingnovel and exciting. This tool helps shift libraries from a static entity intoan active participant in their online community. To this end, libraries arejust beginning to explore the possible uses of Twitter and the functionalityit can bring to their digital environments.

So is Twitter the twenty-first-century CB radio, or is it a worthwhileinvestment of time and energy for libraries? At this point in time, uptakecontinues to grow. Couple this with the growing ubiquity of mobile de-vices and with the lack of specific application as any one sort of tool, andTwitter is definitely worth the initial investment of comprehension andconsideration. As individual professionals, librarians should make the in-vestment of following their own professional organizations and colleaguesand utilize Twitter as an alternative conference attendance mechanism asfunding situations dictate. There are obviously many library policy issuesto be considered before employing any type of social networking tool, butpeople are a-twitter, and librarians should be in on the conversations.

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