Your Online Presence: How Much Is Enough?
Despite the stereotype of the Shy Librarian (which is also an online game where you get to dress up your very own smokin’ hot librarian – who knew?), it seems like the biblioblogosphere is full of information professionals with something to say. A Google search of the term “librarian blog” yields more than half-a-million hits, and the more emotionally loaded term “librarian rant” gets you 5,680 results.
(My favorite example of the latter is the appropriately titled “Unemployed, depressed old librarian’s rant” on DiabetesDaily.com, which starts: “I live in the western part of Kentucky where jobs are scarcer that hen’s teeth. I was released from my prison job for being too nice.”)
So what is the “proper” use of social media for information professionals? Like most things, it depends. Where are you in your career? If you’re two months from retiring, I wouldn’t worry about it. For those just starting out, there are many, including Hack Library School and American Libraries magazine, who believe that a strategically designed online presence, including an e-portfolio, is necessary to help you stand out from the crowd of recent library school graduates. If you have any desire to someday hold a title such as “Emerging Technologies Librarian”, the answer is obvious: Start tweeting immediately, no matter where you are or what you’re doing. Even if you’re at church. Even if it’s a wedding. Even if you’re the bride. What am I saying? Especially if you’re the bride.
Henry Jenkins, currently the Provost’s Professor of Communication, Journalism, and Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California and the past Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program, in Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century, says:
Rather than dealing with each technology in isolation, we would do better to take an ecological approach, thinking about the interrelationship among all of these different communication technologies, the cultural communities that grow up around them, and the activities they support. Media systems consist of communication technologies and the social, cultural, legal, political, and economic institutions, practices, and protocols that shape and surround them (Gitelman, 1999). The same task can be performed with a range of different technologies, and the same technology can be deployed toward a variety of different ends. Some tasks may be easier with some technologies than with others, and thus the introduction of a new technology may inspire certain uses. [p. 8.]
The focus shouldn’t be on using technology; the focus should be on what we want to accomplish. Only after we have determined that should we begin thinking about what types of social media (if any) would work best to accomplish our goal. If your goal would be best served by a blog, by all means, blog away. If your goal would be best served by a plain, old-fashioned phone call or an in-person chinwag, do it that way, and don’t even think of apologizing for not being “2.0” enough.
Because information professionals are supposed to be knowledgeable about all the latest technologies (and we should do our best to stay informed on the topic, so we can serve our patrons better), we sometimes get distracted by all the bells and whistles and forget that any technology is just a tool. A tool is only useful if it helps you accomplish what you want to accomplish. Remember:
What you want to do and why you want to do it is always more important than the how of getting it done.
July 22nd, 2011 at 7:47 pm
Great post. I especially agree with you on the bit about how the focus shouldn’t necessarily be on the technology we’re using at the time. That technology will change, as it has before, but being able to adapt to new technologies as they come out (or dismissing technologies if they don’t fit our purposes, for that matter) is key.
Like you say, tools are tools – the core principles of librarianship are more important than the technologies used to express them.
July 23rd, 2011 at 11:15 am
Very good. For me, it worked exactly as you say. Figuring out what I wanted to do allowed me to figure out what tools I wanted to use and why.