Realia

Archive for November, 2010

Even though my place of work has been sponsoring Nebraska Learns 2.0 for a while now, this is my first time participating. So I’m jumping in and responding to Thing 42: Pimp Your Twitter.

I have been using Twitter for almost three years, and I don’t really use too many external services, but there are a few that have made my life easier.

I use Twitpic in order to share photos via Twitter. I have it set up so that I can take a picture with the camera on my phone and email it to Twitpic. I use it pretty rarely, but I do find it useful on occasions when I want to share pictures.

I also use Twitterfeed to feed content into my Twitter account. I have it set up so that a tweet is generated every time I post to my blog, and I have another feed set up that sends out tweets of my shared items on Google Reader. I find this to be a good way to supplement the things that I post directly to Twitter. I set up the Google Reader feed because I found that I was sharing items on Google Reader and then tweeting about these blog posts on Twitter, and Twitterfeed allows me to share interesting items in multiple places with no extra effort.

In the past, I have used Twuffer in order to schedule tweets to be posted at specific times. I don’t use this very much for my personal account, but I did use it when I was in charge of the Twitter account for the Nebraska Library Association. I didn’t regularly have time to post to this account during the day while I was at work, but I knew that if I only posted during the evenings, some people who only check Twitter during the day would miss all of NLA’s tweets.

I especially think that Twitterfeed and Twuffer (or similar services) could be useful to libraries.  I think that the ability to pull in content from sources outside of Twitter and the ability to schedule tweets to appear at particular times are particularly important for an organization to use to generate an interesting stream of content, even though they can’t have somebody actually posting to Twitter all of the time.  These tools allow you to have frequent Twitter updates, even if you don’t have time to actually log in to Twitter periodically throughout the day.

There have been a number of thoughts rolling around in my head relating to RDA for several weeks now, prompted by some webinars I’ve attended and, more recently, by some discussions on various cataloging listservs. I’ve decided that the time has come to write about my thoughts.

Overall, my thoughts about RDA are similar to those expressed by Christine Schwartz in a recent post on her blog, Cataloging Futures. Is RDA perfect? No. But in general, I’m pro-RDA. The way we catalog is changing, and we need cataloging rules that have changed, too. I don’t think that RDA gets everything right, and I think there are other things about cataloging that need to change (our encoding standards, for example), but I think it’s a step in the right direction.

In addition, I’ve decided that one of the important things to remember when you are thinking about RDA is not to get too worked up over it. I’ve seen far too many blog posts and listserv emails using words like “doom” to refer to RDA. If we can all just keep calm, I think this whole transition will be much more manageable. Yes, there will be changes to the way we work, but I think that the actual impact on our local catalogs will be gradual, and we will have time to make calm, rational decisions along the way.

One source of the panic about RDA is the fact that people feel they don’t have time to learn about it. I’ve heard many people complain about the lack of time to engage in professional development relating to RDA. I’m sympathetic to this complaint. I don’t think any of us have as much time as we’d like to devote to learning new things about our profession. I’m very lucky in that a portion of my job description is to train other librarians on cataloging topics, and so I do get to spend time at work reading about developments like RDA and distilling what I’ve learned into meaningful training. I realize that I’m an anomaly, and that most catalogers have quotas to meet and huge backlogs to conquer. Understandably, they find it hard to keep up.

It’s easy to think of professional development as formally presented training, something that takes you away from work for hours at a time and/or costs large amounts of money. But professional development doesn’t have to be such an imposition. When thinking about RDA, it’s important to realize that professional development can happen more informally. Taking a small chunk of time to read an article or a blog post on a topic that interests you (RDA or anything else) is professional development. Even talking with your colleagues, trading ideas that you’ve learned and asking each other questions, can help you incorporate new information into your knowledge base. With potentially huge changes like RDA, it’s easy to feel like you have to sit down and LEARN IT ALL RIGHT NOW, or you won’t be ready when it happens. I think it’s much healthier to have the attitude that you are going to be open to learning about new things a little at a time and begin to consider how the proposed change might potentially affect you. Some of the things I’ve learned about RDA have been the result of one sentence in an email that made me think about something in a new way, not hours of poring over the text of RDA, or reading lengthy journal articles on the subject.

As a specific example of informal professional development, I am involved with the Technical Services Round Table of my state library association, and we just set up a Google group where interested librarians can come to ask each other questions about RDA. We just launched it, and so there hasn’t been much activity yet, but I’m excited about the prospect of interacting with my local colleagues. I think that communication with your fellow catalogers is an excellent way to gain insight into professional issues.

In short, when it comes to RDA, my advice is this: Don’t panic!  I know that’s easier said than done.  In my opinion, the key to keeping a level head can be summed up in another two-word phrase: Learn more!