#hashtaggery & information control

March 16th, 2011 • library

Tonight I participated in a Twitter chat thingy about libraries. Interested people submitted questions and librarians/libschool students/interested in library stuff people paid attention to the #libchat hashtag which everyone participating used on their tweets. It was pretty fun. That kind of collocating is what hashtags are all about. The questions were fairly routine as far as library angst/information questions go (“Are people who’re hiring looking for Academic Credit or Library Experience?” or “Does Library School need to be a graduate program?”) but it’s interesting to see what people outside of SLAIS think about these things.

I met a couple of people on there I’m now following on Twitter, so I guess it fulfilled its role as a mingling/networking opportunity. It, like HackLibSchool, went beyond “hey that’s a neat idea” to something that people can actually get something out of. Not all social media does that. Lots of people follow @freefoodubc because it’s a good idea, but how many people are actually going to the free food that’s being tweeted? Anything that actually gets people to do stuff, even if that stuff is just discussion, is better than nothing.

Also in terms of sharing and things I went to a colloquium today that I found really interesting. It was about First Nations and digital repatriation of their tangible and intangible culture and how things like images of certain drums and people are pulled off the internet because of local community concerns. That seemed completely antithetical to the “Let’s make information available to everyone” mentality I know I have. I’m thinking about this a bit more before I have a real opinion on it. Here are the rough notes on the talk if you’re interested. (Be warned that almost none of the names were spelled out on any of the slides so all the names are horribly mangled. Sorry.)

Tags: academia, collocation, colloquium, control, culture, digital, drums, experience, first nations, freefoodubc, grad school, hacklibschool, hashtag, information, libchat, networking, repatriation, school, slais, social media, twitter, ubc

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