by Virginia Wilson
Director, Centre of Evidence Based Library and Information Practice
I click on a lot of stars on Twitter. Clicking on the star marks a tweet as a favourite and the idea is that I will go back to these favourites and read whatever it is that first interested me in more depth. Most often, these faves include a link to a blog post or an article that I don’t want to lose track of. What I’ve found is that while well-intentioned, I rarely go back to these stars and explore further. To that end, I’m going to dig through my Twitter favourites and include some of them here. This will serve as double duty: I can get a look at these fascinating links that sparked something in me when I first saw them and I can share them out to hopefully spark you as well. Here we go!
• @Write4Research posted a link to the LSE Impact Blog with the following tweet: “Focus and credibility will help academic blogs thrive but negative perceptions must be challenged.” Turns out this tweet is the title of the blog post and I find it very interesting especially as C-EBLIP has just embarked on this academic blog. I believe there are many good reasons to blog from our own professional perspectives and the author of this post, Achilleas Kostoulas, a Postgraduate Researcher at the University of Manchester, lists quite a few of them plus lots more interesting tidbits. Here’s the link to the LSE post: http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/08/04/focus-credibility-academic-blogging-kostoulas/
• @EBLIP8 posted the call for conference submissions. I’m particularly excited about this as the 8th International Evidence Based Library and Information Practice conference is going to be held July 6-8, 2015 in Brisbane, Australia and I’m going! I’m hoping to have something to present and I’d better get at is because the call for proposals closes on October 13, 2014. http://eblip8.info/2014/08/03/call-for-contributions-now-open/
• @dededawson, a colleague of mine at the University Library, U of S, posted this tweet: More evidence of the OA citation effect. OA articles viewed & cited more than subscription articles. Here’s the link: http://www.nature.com/press_releases/ncomms-report.html DeDe writes an Open Access blog and you can access that here: http://words.usask.ca/openaccess/
• A list of all Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) on Twitter. Twitter allows for the creation of lists and Kitt McGoveran (@kittmcg) created a list of CARL libraries that post on twitter. Here’s the url: https://twitter.com/kittmcg/lists/carl-libraries
• @LibrarySherpa posted “How to be a social media team of one: 7 tips.” These are 7 powerful tips! http://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-to-be-a-social-media-team-of-one-7-tips/
Here are a few of my favourite tweets that don’t include links. It’s amazing how helpful a 140-character (or less) post can be!
• @MariaJGrant: Writing Tip: The *perfect* word/sentence isnt essential to communicate ideas but words/sentences are. Write them down & start communicating!
• @bfister: I think librarians can and should be awesome themselves, not just invisible team members.
• @LibSkrat: I’ll say this as often as I need to: judging a person’s career by the JIF of the journals they publish in is unethical and stupid.
• @ChristineWalde: What’s one of the best things about #librarians doing #research in #LIS? We get to lead the conversation about libraries
• @melioravit: “That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.” ― Christopher Hitchens
I find Twitter to be an excellent way to keep up professionally. I created my account in 2009 (@VirginiaPrimary) but it took me a few years of only tweeting at conferences to really jump on board and make it part of my daily routine.
This article gives the views of the author(s) and not necessarily the views of the Centre for Evidence Based Library and Information Practice or the University Library, University of Saskatchewan.