Going into ALA’s Mid­win­ter Meet­ing last month, I knew Twit­ter was going to play a much more promi­nent role than it had in the past. It’s been used heav­ily at other librar­ian con­fer­ences, but usu­ally in a more social way or as com­men­tary on con­tent dur­ing the event. How­ever, Mid­win­ter is a dif­fer­ent beast, as it’s pri­mar­ily a busi­ness meet­ing for the Asso­ci­a­tion, so I won­dered how much of that work would hap­pen on Twit­ter this time around.

Most of the peo­ple on ALA’s staff, like most peo­ple any­where, have never heard of Twit­ter, let alone used it, so I wanted to give them a heads up in case it came up in meet­ings or in con­ver­sa­tions. A cou­ple of years ago, the IT depart­ment at ALA imple­mented monthly update meet­ings open to all staff, and since we had one sched­uled right before Mid­win­ter, I took advan­tage of the oppor­tu­nity to high­light Twit­ter, what it is, and how a few units are using it.

And then we all headed to Denver.

And wow did Twit­ter play a big part. Ken­ley Neufeld sums it up pretty well, and even notes how fun the expe­ri­ence was. If you had asked me, I wouldn’t have pre­dicted that four coun­cilors would tweet from the floor dur­ing coun­cil ses­sions, thereby pro­vid­ing an effec­tive, real-time tran­script of what was hap­pen­ing. Even beyond that, though, I got to par­tic­i­pate in meet­ings I wasn’t phys­i­cally at (from within other meet­ings), as did peo­ple who weren’t even in Den­ver. And good things came from all of it (includ­ing a help­ful guide for what *not* to do).

So when we got back, I decided to do a pre­sen­ta­tion at the Feb­ru­ary ITTS Update meet­ing about Twit­ter on ALA. Not ALA on Twit­ter, but Twitter’s effect on the Asso­ci­a­tion and the story of Mid­win­ter that Twit­ter pro­duced. Luck­ily, many of the peo­ple who tweet about us have a sense of humor, so there were some good laughs in the screen­shots, espe­cially about our con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem (Col­lage). So thank you to every­one who pub­licly tweeted about us in Jan­u­ary, espe­cially at Mid­win­ter, because you helped me illus­trate a moment in time when some­thing changed for ALA. I def­i­nitely think com­mu­ni­ca­tion and con­fer­ences will never be the same for our orga­ni­za­tion, and I’m fas­ci­nated to see where this all leads.

The only prob­lem with doing these two talks for staff is that I’m so buried in work on launch­ing ALA Con­nect that I don’t have time to do any train­ing right now. Ear­lier this month, Tim­o­thy Vollmer, an ALA employee at our Wash­ing­ton Office tweeted, “in hor­ri­ble ironic moment, U.S. Con­gress is mov­ing faster than ALA.”

For the last month, that’s how I’ve felt at ALA. Units are mov­ing faster than I can, and sev­eral have started new Twit­ter accounts. On the one hand, huz­zah! On the other hand, they’re fly­ing a lit­tle blind (so please cut them a lit­tle slack while they get their Twit­ter sea legs).

Since I really don’t have time to do train­ing right now, I wanted to pull together a few resources to point my co-workers to until we can do some­thing more for­mal. I’m also includ­ing some expla­na­tions for how I track ALA on Twit­ter in case oth­ers want to try these strate­gies, too.

Since I think it could be use­ful to oth­ers, I’m post­ing the list here, rather than just send­ing the infor­ma­tion out in an email to staff. If you have addi­tional sug­ges­tions, please include them in the comments.

1. Make sure you read up on some of the best prac­tices for using Twit­ter. There are many out there, such as Twit­ter 101: 8 Tips to Get Started on Twit­ter and How to Suc­ceed at Twit­ter. At bare min­i­mum, make sure you add an avatar and fill out the bio sec­tion, includ­ing a link back to your web­site.
    
2. I use Twit­ter per­son­ally, and I use the ALAan­nual and ALAmw accounts for work. It’s not easy to track two accounts through­out the day. So here’s the rou­tine I’ve estab­lished to this point.
   1. First thing in the morn­ing, I search Twit­ter for ref­er­ences to ALA. If it’s some­thing I can respond to, I do. If it’s not some­thing in my area (IT), I pass along the information.
   2. I use Tweet­Deck to try to track my Twit­ter­stream through­out the day. It’s eas­ily the best tool I’ve found for two rea­sons. First, it lets me set up dif­fer­ent groups of peo­ple I’m fol­low­ing, so I’ve set up a group show­ing all the ALA Twit­ter accounts and another of friends I want to track more closely. Sec­ond, it lets me do a search within groups by fil­ter­ing for a term. So a cou­ple of times a day, I’ll fil­ter every­one I’m fol­low­ing for the term “ALA.” I can usu­ally get a heads up about any­thing major just by doing this. At the end of the day, I do another search of Twit­ter just to make sure I haven’t missed any­thing. ALA staff, if you want to try Tweet­Deck, I think ITTS will have to install it for you, so con­tact us to request an install. There’s also a help­ful video explain­ing How to Tweet­deck Like a Pro.
       
3. I have a NetVibes page set up to track ALA as a term across mul­ti­ple sites. For exam­ple, the Twit­ter search appears here, although I don’t find it as easy to scan as the list on the Twit­ter site or in Tweet­Deck. But I also have RSS feeds from news sites and Friend­Feed dis­play­ing on this one page, so it can be handy for a quick scan. ALA staff, if you want help set­ting up some­thing like this for your­self, please let me know.
    
4. If you have a blog or other use­ful, not over­whelm­ing RSS feed, use Twit­ter­Feed to auto­mat­i­cally have noti­fi­ca­tions of new items sent to Twit­ter.
    
5. If you’re not using Tweet­Deck to auto­mat­i­cally shorten URLs, you can use TinyURL or is.gd. A URL like http://www.ala.org/heading/subheading/anotherheading/anothersubheading/title/index.cfm should *never* appear in a tweet.
    

As I was get­ting ready to hit the “pub­lish” but­ton, I saw Phil Bradley’s post about CILIP and Twit­ter (or lack thereof). It made me real­ize how far ALA has come, and how lucky I am to work in an envi­ron­ment where I’m allowed to exper­i­ment in these spaces and help inte­grate them into the Asso­ci­a­tion. I live in a really spe­cial place right now, both pro­fes­sion­ally and per­son­ally, and I don’t take that for granted.

There are days when it’s really tough liv­ing on the front end of the bell curve, and clearly Dave Lankes had one of those last week. But instead of let­ting it get him down, it caused him to redou­ble his efforts and even write an inspi­ra­tional post for the rest of us. (Empha­sis below is mine.)

“We live in Shake­spear­ian Times”

“…I won’t get into the details of the meet­ing, but suf­fice to say I had a choice to make — be silent or speak.

You may imag­ine the choice would be easy for me, but it was not. I too face deci­sions between easy dis­con­tent and uncom­fort­able action. To stand up invites more work, or deri­sion, and in either case courts con­flict. It is just eas­ier some­times to let things pass.

I know I am not alone in hav­ing these choices to make. As I go around the coun­try I encounter too many librar­i­ans who see the vision, who embrace change, but have grown too tired and dis­cour­aged to hope again. They are qui­eted by the scars of past opti­mism. These are the con­ver­sa­tions that I have the hard­est time with. I want to ‘go all inspi­ra­tional’ and call them to action, but I too have those scars, and have plenty of times when I tried and failed. It is not a good feel­ing. I would like to avoid it too. So I never want to fault oth­ers for their decisions.…

It may sound sim­plis­tic, but for me it comes down to need­ing some encour­age­ment. We need to know that we are not alone. We are not. There is a whole pool of fel­low librar­i­ans that ‘get it.’ We also need to real­ize that those who get it aren’t just new librar­i­ans, but direc­tors, man­agers, and pol­icy mak­ers. We have a lot of good exam­ples to show the way as well. When I have those bad days, the first thing I have to do is decide to speak up. Then I have to do some­thing. Even if what­ever I decide to do is wrong, it is some­thing. Finally, I lis­ten to Shake­speare. Seriously.

For some peo­ple when they need to get a pick me up it is music, for oth­ers a movie, for still oth­ers it is ‘the story’ I’ve talked about before (that time that you as a librar­ian changed someone’s life for the bet­ter). But for me, Shake­speare … Henry V’s St. Crispen’s Day Speech. I have to thank George Need­ham for intro­duc­ing me to it.…

How do I stay opti­mistic? I real­ize first the issues I face are minis­cule to the good I can do. How do I get inspired to face intran­si­gence, or lazi­ness, or inep­ti­tude? I look right past them at the real goal, and those who really need me.

Block me, and I will go around you. Build a wall, and I will build a door. Lock the door and I will break a win­dow. And if I don’t have have a leader to inspire me, I will lead. If I don’t have a team that will sup­port me, I will recruit a team from beyond the orga­ni­za­tional bound­aries — every pol­icy has a loop­hole, every sys­tem has a hid­den reward.” [The Par­tic­i­pa­tory Librar­i­an­ship Starter Kit]

I think I’m going to print this out and post it above my desk, so thanks for writ­ing this, Dave. And along these same lines, I want to note one other thing about librar­i­ans. We don’t get the credit we deserve for lead­ing in the 2.0 world, but more impor­tantly, we don’t give our­selves enough credit. While I always think there’s more we can do, exper­i­ment with, and improve, it’s also impor­tant to take a step back and sur­vey just how much we’ve done in this sphere as a profession.

Librar­i­ans were one of the first pro­fes­sions blog­ging, and by a pretty wide mar­gin. In fact, I’ll even go out on a limb to say that behind the techies, I think we had the largest crit­i­cal mass first — ahead of the jour­nal­ists, mar­keters, lawyers, and other trades that have a large pres­ence in the blo­gos­phere. And in terms of try­ing out new tools and inte­grat­ing them into our ser­vices, I’d be hard-pressed to find more early adopters in a pro­fes­sion other than librar­i­an­ship in the areas of instant mes­sag­ing, wikis, Face­book, and Twit­ter. We swarm on a new tool and play with it faster than 90%+ of the folks out there, and we’re con­stantly try­ing new things.

Sure, there’s a wide range of skills and adop­tion among librar­i­ans and only a small per­cent­age are on the front of the bell curve, but the next time you hear some­one berate libraries for stay­ing stuck in the past, don’t let them make a gen­er­al­iza­tion. We all need to keep mov­ing for­ward, but there are a lot of good things hap­pen­ing in the pro­fes­sion, mak­ing it an excit­ing time to be a librar­ian. Make a wall into a door and keep try­ing. It’s worth it, and you can make a difference.