Or, if you work at cer­tain com­pa­nies, you do. Or could.

I had some inter­est­ing con­ver­sa­tions about pri­vacy at ALA’s Mid­win­ter Meet­ing, which got me think­ing about which com­pa­nies prob­a­bly know the most about me.

I’ve thought about my own “walled gar­den” a lot and worked through what I’ll share pub­licly, pri­vately, and pre­tend pri­vately. Most things I share pub­licly, and you can see a list of many of the sites I use on my Friend­Feed account. It’s not dif­fi­cult to piece together infor­ma­tion about me by track­ing these sites, but over­all I’m more care­ful with spe­cific things like loca­tion information.

The rou­tine I’ve worked out is that Face­book is my only truly pri­vate post­ing area, although I do occa­sion­ally post some pic­tures for “friends and fam­ily only” on Flickr. Since I still don’t trust Face­book to not re-publish or claim own­er­ship of “pri­vate” con­tent (like pic­tures and videos), I don’t post any­thing orig­i­nal there except sta­tus updates and com­ments on friends’ updates. Even then, I don’t kid myself that those things are truly pri­vate (they’re the “pre­tend pri­vately” I men­tioned above). That’s why I’ve become a lot more selec­tive about who I’ll friend there, and why I post some Foursquare loca­tion updates there (rather than on Twitter).

So if you can find out so much infor­ma­tion about me pub­licly, which com­pa­nies know the most about me? It’s been a very thought-provoking exer­cise to come up with the fol­low­ing list. I tried to rank the com­pa­nies in order of how much daily infor­ma­tion I think they’re accu­mu­lat­ing about me, but it’s tough to decide if “what I’m eat­ing” equals “what I’m watching.”

• Cell carrier/cellphone maker — they know my loca­tion at any given time, plus all of the data that goes through my phone (and I don’t have a land­line, so every­thing goes through my cell)
• Cable com­pany = they know what I watch on TV and what I surf on the net
• Bank = they know most of the places where I spend my money
• Credit cards = they know a lot of places I spend my money
• LISHost — hosts my web­site and email, which would include a lot of receipts for online purchases
• Google = knows most of the things I search for and many things I read (via <http://reader.google.com/”>Google Reader); even though I don’t use Gmail, any email I send to Gmail users is in their archives
• Ama­zon = knows about a lot of things I pur­chase and read (includ­ing via my Kindle)
• Face­book = knows a lot about what I say about myself via sta­tus updates and who my friends are
• Friend­Feed (now owned by Face­book) = aggre­gates a lot about what I say about myself pub­licly online, plus which con­ver­sa­tions and peo­ple I watch on the site
• Net­flix = knows a lot about what I watch
• Foursquare = knows some about where I am/go
• Flickr = knows a lot about where I am/go, who my friends/contacts are, and what inter­ests me
• Twit­ter = knows my net­work and who I inter­act with the most
• Health care provider = I’m lucky that I’ve been rel­a­tively healthy, but my provider(s) know about any problems
• Deli­cious = knows a lot about sites I’ve vis­ited and want to remember
• Dopplr = knows my trips and some of my friends
• Ever­note = knows about some things I want to remem­ber, although I haven’t put much per­sonal infor­ma­tion there yet
• Illi­nois Depart­ment of Trans­porta­tion (IDOT) = I don’t drive nearly as much as I used to any­more, but IDOT knows when I go on tollroads

Obvi­ously I’m okay with what I share pub­licly, and in many respects, there have been enor­mous ben­e­fits to doing that, but I have very lit­tle con­trol over what these com­pa­nies do with the infor­ma­tion they’re col­lect­ing about me, and I don’t trust any of them. I think the only com­pany I do trust is LISHost, which hosts my web­site and email (thanks, Blake!). How much do I really care that Face­book keeps my sta­tus updates for­ever, whereas my email provider keeps my more pri­vate mes­sages? And how much do I worry that my pri­vate email still goes through my cable provider’s net­work to get to LISHost?

I’m try­ing to rec­og­nize which com­pa­nies are col­lect­ing ambi­ent infor­ma­tion about me, with­out me proac­tively post­ing any­thing. I’m sure I’m miss­ing some, though. If you’ve thought through this your­self, what’s not on my list?

ALCTS Sym­po­sium, ALA Mid­win­ter Meet­ing, Jan­u­ary 14, 2010

John Pal­frey — Born Digital

noticed dur­ing the round robin dis­cus­sions how many hats librar­i­ans are hav­ing to wear
the idea that there’s no one dis­ci­pline that can answer a problem

bust­ing myths about dig­i­tal natives
not all kids relate to infor­ma­tion and tech­nol­ogy in the same way — there is no one dig­i­tal gen­er­a­tion
there are élite kids who go to schools like Har­vard who are tech­ni­cal, they use the tools, they can teach us lots of stuff, and do awe­some things
that’s who we think of as the dig­i­tal natives gen­er­a­tion
these are only a sub­set of the pop­u­la­tion, though
but it’s about what Henry Jenk­ins talks about — the par­tic­i­pa­tion gap

and of course, it’s not just the kids
lots of us use tech­nol­ogy in advanced ways
the cur­rent terms aren’t ade­quate — many of us are “dig­i­tal settlers”

the social life of kids today is chang­ing very quickly — how kids cre­ate dig­i­tal iden­tity
kids don’t dis­tin­guish between their online and offline iden­ti­ties
and they’re cre­at­ing all the time in this con­verged environment

most kids are look­ing down at their lap­tops
mul­ti­task­ing is part of their cul­ture
is there a dif­fer­ence between mul­ti­task­ing and switchtasking?

the way they relate to infor­ma­tion is a pre­sump­tion that the nature of media is dig­i­tal
–pic­tures, YouTube, and increas­ingly print
pre­sump­tion that they’re full text search­able, too

they also expect that they can do some­thing social with that media
these tech­nolo­gies were devel­oped by young peo­ple for young peo­ple
the cre­ativ­ity is not just in how the tools are used but in cre­at­ing the tools, too

issues:
– intel­lec­tual prop­erty
a large group of the techie kids are get­ting their music free online & they know it’s wrong
the power of social norms trumps the law
we can give them all these great ser­vices, lock things down, etc., but these kids are show­ing us that they’re going to do what they want to any­way
– cred­i­bil­ity
asked kids where they go for infor­ma­tion; if it’s for a course, they check the course books; oth­er­wise, they open a web browser, searched google, and scanned the results for the wikipedia entry
the most sophis­ti­cated kids knew not to trust the wikipedia entry and would tri­an­gu­late with other infor­ma­tion and links
on the other hand, other kids just copied and pasted it ver­ba­tim into the paper
– infor­ma­tion over­load
they’re get­ting their infor­ma­tion through osmo­sis online

the Google Book Set­tle­ment is a cru­cial piece of the future for libraries
libraries as pub­lish­ers — we’re not just cre­at­ing a space or infor­ma­tion
empha­size ways to col­lab­o­rate as pub­lish­ers in these infor­ma­tion zones for young peo­ple
they don’t start with our resources that we’re build­ing as pub­lish­ers — they get there through search engines
Google Scholar is a way through this zone
is that a good idea? should we think about our own forms of search engines and inter­faces? should we part­ner with one huge player? have to think about our role

there is enor­mous growth in print on demand
a lot of it is self-publishing and in the aca­d­e­mic space (course books), but there’s also a rea­son to believe machines (like Espresso) will be sup­planted by the kin­dle and ebook read­ers
in five years, these machines will have an enor­mous impact on libraries
it’s not just the young peo­ple who are born dig­i­tal — it’s the infor­ma­tion, too
they may still pre­fer a phys­i­cal object as a book

have to think not just like social sci­en­tists or librar­i­ans but also like archi­tects
one of the things we have not yet done is describe the dig­i­tal library in the same way we do the phys­i­cal one
you’d hire an archi­tect for a phys­i­cal build­ing and describe it in a vision­ary way
we don’t do that for the dig­i­tal library, even though half of users may come not come through the front door of the build­ing
need to come up with a design that’s inspir­ing and isn’t dig­i­tal only
we can be wildly suc­cess­ful at bring­ing peo­ple into libraries and pro­vid­ing ser­vices if we do this

ques­tion from audi­ence: ten­sion between libraries and pri­vacy with this gen­er­a­tion
answer: john was blown away by how strong the ethos of pri­vacy is in the library com­mu­nity; in young peo­ple, pri­vacy expec­ta­tions are chang­ing very quickly; they do care about pri­vacy, but it’s highly con­tex­tual; they care about it in cer­tain ways (keep info from their mom but fine with a mil­lion peo­ple see­ing it); because there’s such a strong ethos, this is a great teach­ing area for librarians

ques­tion: when social norms trump law, how do we define when that’s okay?
answer: just because every­body does it doesn’t make it okay; ana­log­i­cally, is file shar­ing like under­age drink­ing? we don’t have a good answer for this. we’ve come up with a lot of dif­fer­ent sce­nar­ios, but we’re at a moment where copy­right gets more strin­gent while the social norms swing the other way

John Wilkin — Think­ing and Act­ing Glob­ally to Bet­ter Serve Local Needs: the Michi­gan Dig­i­tal Library

dig­i­tal libraries have just com­pleted an unre­mark­able decade
are we get­ting our resources into the right place to reach users?
70% of OAIs­ter con­tent was miss­ing from Google
our stub­born refusal to deny a dis­cov­ery resource

What Is Hathi Trust?

Jenny: sorry — this is where I had to deal with some­thing out­side of the sym­po­sium, so I don’t have notes after this point

ALCTS Sym­po­sium, ALA Mid­win­ter Meet­ing, Jan­u­ary 14, 2010

John Yemma — Going Web-first at The Chris­t­ian Sci­ence Monitor

The CSM reports the news but also tries to help find solu­tions
“The Econ­o­mist with heart“
like every news orga­ni­za­tion, they’re strug­gling
mov­ing off the CS Church sub­sidy in five years and have to cre­ate a sus­tain­able model
moved to only one day print
3 pub­li­ca­tions now — the daily news brief­ing (2000 sub­scribers), print, web
the news­room now feeds all three of these prod­ucts, but feeds the web first
have boosted their traf­fic 50% year over year
now that they’ve bro­ken out of the print design par­a­digm, all of their efforts are decou­pled from print and assets are put directly against the web (SEO, more timely news moment-to-moment)
new con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem facil­i­tat­ing all of this
when you move to web first, you have to democ­ra­tize con­tent cre­ation (not just HTML so that non-technical peo­ple can pub­lish on the web)
build­ing a strong com­mu­nity strat­egy, par­tic­u­larly on Face­book
do a lot of online research, feed­back research
they’re essen­tially on a weekly news­magazine sched­ule (big shift for a for­mally print news­pa­per)
mov­ing to a harder news approach
new mar­ket­ing effort for the Daily News Briefing

the web is not just des­ti­na­tion web­sites, repli­cas of print prod­ucts
the dig­i­tal gen­er­a­tion we know isn’t liv­ing on des­ti­na­tion web­sites
dis­ag­gre­ga­tion is the world we’re deal­ing with now
we’re also at the end of the inter­net growth area, which means it will be a strug­gle since the bar­ri­ers to entry are so low
very dif­fi­cult to put gen­eral news behind a pay wall
every­one is a jour­nal­ist; the glory days of jour­nal­ism are gone (which is good in a way)
thinks rules should be relaxed to let news­pa­pers own a cable chan­nel
it’s an inter­ac­tive pub­lish­ing medium now and adap­ta­tion is the only way to go

Tom Cor­bett — Col­lec­tion Devel­op­ment in an all Dig­i­tal Age

when he shows kids you can increase the text size on the kin­dle, they look at him funny and don’t get it
they’re doing a lot of recre­ational read­ing on the kin­dles
started his job at cush­ing acad­emy and then got on the roller­coaster of hav­ing his efforts labeled as “the end of read­ing“
the deci­sion had already been made to make the library dig­i­tal before he started (although he did agree with it)

Ann Wolpert — Is There an App for that? Dig­i­tal Natives and the Infor­ma­tion Commons

she’s look­ing for­ward to the day Tom’s stu­dents get to MIT and looks at the com­plex struc­ture of ser­vices and asks “is there an app for this?”

no longer have clear answers about how we define “the library” any­more and what it is
now we’re faced with the chal­lenge of cre­at­ing new definitions

3 things that are pro­foundly dif­fer­ent because of the inter­net than what we’re used to in the past
1. net­works (the inter­net) moves con­tent from the cen­ter to the edge
2. fun­da­men­tal changes in the way peo­ple assess and value infor­ma­tion; the per­cep­tion that if it’s not on the inter­net, it doesn’t exist
3. lets libraries cus­tomize the ser­vices they pro­vide to their con­stituen­cies; our model used to be we build it and you come to us; for the first time, the inter­net gives us the chance to ask who our patrons are, let them come to us over the inter­net, and lets us design ser­vices for this

every gen­er­a­tion is dif­fer­ent and the same
infor­ma­tion seek­ing behav­ior is learned (MIT says that learn­ing now comes from Ama­zon and Google & other com­mer­cial enti­ties who have their own mod­els and pur­poses)
remem­ber the heated debate about using cal­cu­la­tors in the classroom?

peter drucker said of not-for-profits that the pri­mary pur­pose is to attract cus­tomers; you have no rea­son to exist if that’s not your goal

those aspects which are dif­fer­ent deserve our cre­ative atten­tion
– dig­i­tal natives will live in online com­mu­ni­ties
– expe­ri­ence with tech­nol­ogy will be amaz­ingly var­ied
– expo­sure to norms of schol­ar­ship like­wise pla­gia­rism, source eval­u­a­tion, and rigor
– naïve users equate appli­ca­tions facil­ity with advanced exper­tise in all domains

what a good infor­ma­tion com­mons will be mission-based:
– librar­i­ans are edu­ca­tors who part­ner with other edu­ca­tors in the process of instruct­ing a com­mu­nity, both for­mally and infor­mally, about infor­ma­tion and how you use it well
– libraries are service-providers; tech­nol­ogy is com­pletely insuf­fi­cient with­out con­text and sup­port
– good polices are essen­tial; have to also remain flex­i­ble and adapt­able (now switch­ing to a finan­cial model)

(then I spoke about gam­ing in libraries)

ALCTS Sym­po­sium, ALA Mid­win­ter Meet­ing, Jan­u­ary 14, 2010

Mar­garet Ashida — Going Global in the Knowl­edge Economy

the global econ­omy is a knowl­edge econ­omy
agri­cul­ture –> goods –> ser­vices (shift­ing eco­nom­ices over time, now it’s services)

(one per­son raised her hand when asked if there were any dig­i­tal natives in the room — yay!)

today’s stu­dents are very dif­fer­ent and are not the ones our edu­ca­tion sys­tem is designed to teach
today’s social net­works and tools are impor­tant for recruit­ing and engag­ing with prospec­tive employ­ees now
there’s no expec­ta­tion any­more that you’ll stay at the same com­pany for 30 years
have to give employ­ees the feel­ing that their work mat­ters
IBM let all employ­ees chat online with the CEO

Why STEM?
(there have been so many stud­ies about this stuff now that there are stud­ies say­ing, please — no more stud­ies
mas­tery of sci­ence, tech­nol­ogy, math is vitally impor­tant for all of our kids
“the oppor­tu­nity equa­tion” — took a lot of these stud­ies to another level (Carnegie Cor­po­ra­tion)
– aligned the rec­om­men­da­tions by stake­holder groups
first STEM stu­dents will come out of the pro­gram in 2011 — 166,000 of them
momen­tum is build­ing around the coun­try around STEM
more than 150 schools now

teach­ing inno­va­tion is a major focus
more than 500 stake­hold­ers in the Rochester STEM pro­gram
“need to embed STEM learn­ing from twin­kle to wrinkle”

North Carolina’s design prin­ci­ples:
1. make STEM lit­er­acy & eco­nomic oppor­tu­nity attain­able for ALL NC stu­dents as soon as pos­si­ble
2. drive scal­able and sus­tain­able inno­va­tions for con­tin­u­ous improve­ment
3. focus on suc­cess at a higher level & empower com­mu­ni­ties along with their edu­ca­tors to inno­vate
4. empower & sup­port a cul­ture that nur­tures the cre­ation of inno­v­a­tive STEM pro­fes­sion­als
5. incu­bate sup­ports col­lab­o­ra­tion & net­work behav­ior for STEM excel­lence through knowl­edge capture

“think glob­ally and act locally”

Kevin Guthrie — When Books are Bytes, What Adds Value?

Ithaka is a not-for-profit org ded­i­cated to help­ing the aca­d­e­mic com­mu­nity (JSTOR, PORTICO,Ithaka S+R)

uni­ver­si­ties become dra­mat­i­cally more acces­si­ble and will be drawn more into com­merce
com­merce is drawn into the world of the acad­emy; it’s never impacted the acad­emy in these ways before (espe­cially schol­arly com­mu­ni­ca­tion)
sys­tems were ori­ented towards serv­ing schol­ars, but now that the knowl­edge is dig­i­tal and uses a com­mon net­work, the scholar uses Ama­zon to search for a book, not the library — that’s new
schol­ars used tools designed for them — the lines are blur­ring now
the net­work is now ubiq­ui­tous
the pace of inno­va­tion is on inter­net time
today’s value added is tomorrow’s com­mod­ity — any­body can hire a ven­dor to do some­thing
con­tent is mov­ing to the wire

com­pared Block­buster (phys­i­cal infra­struc­ture) and Net­Flix (dis­tri­b­u­tion net­work, cus­tomer ser­vice focus)
anal­ogy to libraries

libraries can’t depend on the cen­tral­ity of their build­ing as a source of value in the pro­vi­sion of infor­ma­tion
it’s still very valu­able, but by itself it’s not value for dis­sem­i­nat­ing knowl­edge
it has to have ser­vice lay­ers on top of it & libraries have to com­pete to serve their nat­ural constituencies

jour­nals have made the tran­si­tion to the elec­tronic envi­ron­ment
evo­lu­tion­ary inno­va­tion, not trans­for­ma­tive inno­va­tion
libraries are doing this, too

what about books, though?
the tran­si­tion from the objects to the bits
the value in mov­ing phys­i­cal objects is going down
jour­nals are very spe­cial­ized; books are not spe­cial­ized to the acad­emy like jour­nals
the tools and capa­bil­i­ties pro­vided are likely to be opti­mized for a non-academic audience

in this envi­ron­ment, the advan­tage goes to scale
what needs to be a spe­cial­ized resource? we keep think­ing some things need to be spe­cial­ized, but then we watch Google come in and do it “good enough”

there is a ten­sion to be man­aged between serv­ing your insti­tu­tion or a broader audi­ence
how do you jus­tify the local bills when offer­ing dig­i­tal col­lec­tions glob­ally? how do you match the con­stituen­cies who pay with those you serve?
pres­sures on costs make this a more chal­leng­ing ques­tion
can the uni­ver­sity really say our mis­sion is to serve the world?

great evo­lu­tion­ary change, but haven’t seen trans­for­ma­tive change yet (will come with ubiq­ui­tous net­work, when users use the net­work to do schol­ar­ship in cre­ative ways — not just a bet­ter way of doing what we always did)

a race to pro­vid­ing many-to-many iner­ac­tions, shar­ing, and research sup­port tools that assist the knowl­edge cre­ation process (in con­trast to approaches focused pri­mar­ily on knowl­edge dissemination)

as more con­tent & knowl­edge go dig­i­tal, pres­sure on libraries & pub­lish­ers to add value through the spe­cial­ized ser­vices they pro­vide to researchers & stu­dents (as opposed to assis­tance in the use of phys­i­cal objects)

ques­tion from audi­ence: when will books really become dig­i­tal?
answer: there are likely to be two phases. google book search said, hey this is pos­si­ble. before that, most peo­ple said all of the con­tent would never be dig­i­tized. we don’t have to wait until it’s all there, so the pres­sure will come when the read­ers are good enough. that mar­ket is grow­ing, so the com­mer­cial pres­sures will wash over us at that point. that’s maybe 3 years away. the upper demo­graphic is using the read­ers, and the younger ones are using the iphone. but it won’t be because every book is avail­able dig­i­tally and freely

ques­tion: what about the role we play in con­tex­tu­al­iz­ing resources? do peo­ple value the JSTOR clas­si­fi­ca­tion scheme?
answer: there’s too much infor­ma­tion already, and there’s only going to be more. the que­si­ton kevin doesn’t know how to answer right now is tools — at some level, tools want to go to the cloud/network level; believes in the value of the face-to-face inter­ac­tion and under­stand­ing needs; con­tex­tu­al­iz­ing locally will have value, but you have to make invest­ments to under­stand the needs of that com­mu­nity. how do I under­stand what I can do for my local con­stituents because I’m here phys­i­cally in this area — that’s where nobody can com­pete with me.

See Also: Ithaka’s Case Stud­ies in Sustainability

I’ve been mulling over this post for sev­eral weeks now, but a con­ver­sa­tion that hap­pened on Twit­ter today prompted me to finally write and pub­lish it. It started when Ken­ley Neufeld wrote a post about par­tic­i­pat­ing in ALA and tweeted the link. Cyndi E. engaged Ken­ley in a con­ver­sa­tion about ALA fol­low­ing its mem­bers back on Twit­ter, which led Ken­ley to ask ALA’s Mid­win­ter Meet­ing account what its fol­low pol­icy is.

Well, I work for ALA, and I run that account (along with three oth­ers), plus my per­sonal one. The “royal” ALA has no offi­cial social media pol­icy, although there is an inter­nal staff task force work­ing on one. I’m not on that group and I haven’t wanted to step on any toes, which is why I haven’t said much online about this topic, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t thought through some things for the accounts I man­age. Given today’s con­ver­sa­tion, I thought I’d share my approach and solicit feed­back for what you think is and isn’t working.

Before I go any fur­ther, though, I want to note that I kind of fly by the seat of my pants with this stuff at work. I already have a cou­ple of full time roles (as does pretty much every­one at ALA HQ), and track­ing what’s said about MPOW online is pretty near impos­si­ble these days. Amongst the good and bad about the Amer­i­can Library Asso­ci­a­tion, the term “ALA” also gets used for A List Apart (espe­cially when they pub­lish a new issue), the abbre­vi­a­tion for “Alabama” in news reports, Ala Moana in Hon­olulu, ala mode, “ala” mean­ing “in the style of,” in Span­ish, and more. I do the best I can, but no one per­son could catch it all unless it was their only job respon­si­bil­ity. I know a lot of folks strug­gle to get sup­port from the top in their orga­ni­za­tion, and I’m lucky that this isn’t one of the bat­tles I have to fight.

All of which is my way of say­ing, your mileage may vary, even within ALA. These are just my thoughts for how I’m han­dling four Twit­ter accounts at work, and I’d love to hear how you think I could do this bet­ter. Maybe this list willl even give you some pro­ce­dural ideas for your own institution’s efforts.

I mainly mon­i­tor and man­age Twit­ter and Friend­Feed accounts, so that’s where I focus my efforts. I’m lucky that oth­ers have taken on the man­tle of man­ag­ing ALA’s Face­book, LinkedIn, Sec­ond Life, and YouTube pres­ences. These are the guide­lines I’ve been fol­low­ing for Twit­ter (I still need to imple­ment most of these on FriendFeed).

1. My goals for the accounts are to lis­ten, answer ques­tions, inter­act, and inform.
2. I fol­low most pub­lic accounts that fol­low us, as long as its not a spam­mer, bot, or “social media expert” who has thou­sands of fol­low­ers. I don’t have any­thing against the gurus, but they’re not the audi­ence I want to inter­act with. It may take me a week to log in and fol­low all the new folks, but that’s my goal. I’m some­what pas­sive about this because of the lack of an easy way to han­dle fol­low­ers from one source, although right now I’m actively try­ing to fol­low any human being who say they’re attend­ing our Mid­win­ter Meet­ing this week. I do this to make it eas­ier to lis­ten and respond, plus it gives these folks the abil­ity to direct mes­sage us.
3. The excep­tion to rule #2 is that I don’t fol­low pri­vate accounts. I real­ize some folks make their accounts pri­vate to avoid spam­mers, but I can’t tell those from the folks who truly want their tweets to be pri­vate. As an orga­ni­za­tional account that mul­ti­ple staff mem­bers might have access to, I don’t want to expose those tweets or set up a sit­u­a­tion where some­one might acci­den­tally retweet some­thing private.
4. I try to do more than just click a book­marklet, so I’ll rephrase con­tent to get it down to 130 char­ac­ters or some­how add value to the head­line of a press release. I try to be human and avoid mar­ket­ing speak, and I don’t get hung up on cap­i­tal­iza­tion, even though my under­grad­u­ate degree is in journalism.
5. I do my best to shoot for 130 char­ac­ters to pro­vide for easy retweetability.
6. Although this doesn’t apply to all orga­ni­za­tions, I’m a big believer in the “right of first tweet.” Within ALA, there’s no one “mas­ter” Twit­ter account for the Asso­ci­a­tion as a whole. Instead, every office, divi­sion, round table, etc., has its own account. In order to help build the audi­ence for those accounts and give credit, I try to not announce news first that really belongs to other ALA units. Instead, I do my best to retweet their tweets. That doesn’t always hap­pen, but I think it’s their right to have the first shot at it.
7. Some­thing new I’ve been try­ing lately is to avoid retweet­ing some­one else’s con­tent imme­di­ately after they tweet it, espe­cially if they’ve used a hash­tag. Instead, I use Hoot­Suite to sched­ule the tweet at a dif­fer­ent time of day in order to try to reach a dif­fer­ent audi­ence that may not have seen the orig­i­nal one. If it was a morn­ing tweet, I’ll sched­ule the retweet for the after­noon, and vice versa.
8. I’m cur­rently using bit.ly to shorten URLs so that I can get sta­tis­tics for how often links are being fol­lowed. I also try to use cus­tom bit.ly URLs for links I know I’ll re-use a lot. I fer­vently wish Hoot­Suite would get rid of the frames on its ow.ly ser­vice or at least give URL cre­ators the option to turn them off. Until then, I’ll keep using bit.ly.
9. I delib­er­ately retweet from indi­vid­u­als, not just other ALA units or orga­ni­za­tions. My take on it is that we’re all in this together, and we’re all part of the con­ver­sa­tion. Of course, that doesn’t mean I’ll be retweet­ing every­thing posted to the #nopants tag.
10. Rather than count­ing the num­ber of fol­low­ers as a met­ric, I’ve started track­ing con­ver­sa­tions. I still haven’t found what I con­sider to be an opti­mal way to do this, but for the moment, I’m clip­ping tweets to a note­book in my Ever­note account (I’m on the free ser­vice for now) so that I can find them again. Because it’s so dif­fi­cult to track the term “ALA,” I haven’t found an easy way to report out what’s being said about us, other than by man­u­ally writ­ing up an email.
11. Per­son­ally, I have an unlim­ited text mes­sag­ing plan (I <3 texting), so I use notify.me to have Twit­ter men­tions sent to my phone via SMS so that I get imme­di­ate alerts when some­one men­tions or directs a tweet to one of the ALA accounts. If you don’t want to go the SMS route, you can have the noti­fi­ca­tions sent to an email address, instant mes­sag­ing account, or to a desk­top app/widget. And this setup doesn’t nec­es­sar­ily mean I respond right away, espe­cially if I’m out with friends, watch­ing a movie, or if it’s late at night. I’ve worked hard to bal­ance my work and per­sonal lives, and so far it’s work­ing fairly well. But the notice gives me a heads up, and I can then assess the urgency.

Those are the var­i­ous Twit­ter issues I’ve thought through so far. Based on some other prob­lems that have come up at work, I have some gen­eral advice for other orga­ni­za­tions using social sites.

• Did you know that the per­son who cre­ates a Face­book page can never be removed? Never, ever, ever, ever plus a day. The only way is to delete the person’s account, which an orga­ni­za­tion can’t do if it’s a per­sonal account. So be care­ful about who cre­ates your organization’s page(s), because you’ll never be able to remove that per­son as an admin. You can add other admins, but you can’t remove the orig­i­nal cre­ator. Add my voice to the cho­rus of frus­trated users who wish Face­book would change this pol­icy yesterday.
• Be very care­ful when you’re set­ting up your bit.ly links. If you acci­den­tally paste in the wrong URL (which I’ve done), you can’t go back and change it. Ever, as in ever plus a day. If you mess up a cus­tom URL, you’ll never be able to get it back. Ever. Did I men­tion ever?
• And speak­ing of bit.ly, if you haven’t already done this, you might want to go grab the most obvi­ous cus­tom bit.ly URLs for your orga­ni­za­tion so that some­one else doesn’t use/steal/hijack them. Espe­cially if you want a short and easy way to point to your own site on Twit­ter and get sta­tis­tics for num­ber of clicks. You can decide if you want to do this on other URL short­en­ing ser­vices, too.

So those are some quick thoughts that have been swim­ming around in my head. I’d love to hear your thoughts about how I can do this bet­ter, and what you’d like to see from the ALA accounts I run.

I know a lot of libraries (espe­cially aca­d­e­mic ones) have screens near the check­out area that patrons can read while they wait in line. I love the idea of mak­ing those signs inter­ac­tive, although I’ll be inter­ested to hear how the hard­ware holds up over time.

Last week­end we had an energy audit done on our house, a fas­ci­nat­ing exer­cise to watch. Besides the fact that I was inter­ested to see what our issues are, I was cap­ti­vated by the equip­ment used. Being a geek, it was extra fun for me.

infrared cam­era

As the gen­tle­man who per­formed the audit (Jim) worked, we had a lovely talk about a vari­ety of things, includ­ing libraries. We talked about ebooks (he has a Kin­dle) and libraries (he thinks we’ll be cut out of the pic­ture) and library ser­vices in gen­eral. Jim men­tioned how he tries to work with orga­ni­za­tions to improve energy effi­ciency, includ­ing libraries. Appar­ently he’s worked with Wis­con­sin libraries to give each one a wattmeter to cir­cu­late to res­i­dents who want to mon­i­tor their elec­tric­ity (see this exam­ple).

Jim is eager to work with Illi­nois libraries to see what we could do to help patrons who want to do more to make their homes more energy effi­cient. Chicagoland libraries already cir­cu­late museum passes, some libraries still cir­cu­late art, and there are toy libraries, so why not this ser­vice? Sev­eral libraries are offer­ing new gad­gets for cir­cu­la­tion (GPS devices, Flip video cam­eras, ebook read­ers), so lend­ing tech­nol­ogy isn’t new, either. There’s a lot of talk right now about green libraries, but can libraries green go that next step and help green their communities?

I love the idea, espe­cially when com­bined with com­ple­men­tary pro­grams, read­ing lists, and com­mu­nity con­nec­tions. Are any libraries out­side of Wis­con­sin offer­ing this type of ser­vice? If you’re in Wis­con­sin, have patrons been using your wattmeter?