Thing 7 was all about Twitter. I have used twitter for well over a year now but never on a more professional or serious basis. After I signed up I found out that only few of my friends actually use twitter and that none of my fellow students have a twitter account. Their lives are all on facebook. A few months ago I read about a study which found out that twitter gets used by 'older' people (i.e. those in their late 30s and older) and not really by the current student generation. Therefore, I always considered a library twitter account somewhat useless if it is aimed at students. I think that twitter is more useful for spreading links and news to other librarians. Given that so many Cambridge librarians signed up on twitter and connect to each other, makes twitter quite a powerful network - if people keep using it after the novelty character (or 23 Things workshop, whichever happens first) wears off. Here's a screenshot with some of the library 'tweeple' I'm connected to now:
Thing 8 is all about tags and categories. Discussing these and the article by Shirky made for some interesting comments and disucssion on the web, given that librarians work with these on a daily basis to get some structure into libraries and resources. I especially liked Library Wanderer's entry about this. In repsonse to Shirky's post I would argue that we all categorise the world according to our own cognitive preferences which are shaped by internal (genetically determined, e.g. right handed or left handed) and external (shaped by our experiences) factors. These individual categories have a major impact on the way we think and operate. When categories are created with the aim of sharing them with other people, these are - by its very own nature - compromises. Therefore, they will always be imperfect for the individual but hopefully meaningful for most.As for tagging, it reminds me of the Library of Congress entries I use when cataloguing books: You just have to get it right, otherwise your entry won't be found and will be lost forever (slightly exaggerated, but you get my point). However, I would argue that it's more about the quality of tags rather than the quantity. Therefore, I won't add more tags to my blog but rather review the existing ones and substitute them by more suitable ones where necessary.
I love your new look blog page with the great picture of old books! I think you're right about quality of tags- some tags are just plain useless (like the popular "picture book" tag on the Ann Arbor libray site). The more specific the tags the more helpful they are, in my opinion!
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