Realia

Archive for July, 2011

Okay, so it’s been a very long time since I participated in a Friday Fill-In on Wife of a Sailor’s blog, but this week’s seemed easy – a series of either/or questions, so here goes:

Facebook or Twitter? Both! I use Facebookfor keeping up with people I know in real life; I mainly use Twitter for connecting with other librarians and other milspouses, most of whom I haven’t actually met.

Hard Tacos or Soft Tacos? Hard – tacos should be crunchy!

Gardening or crafting? Crafting, definitely crafting, a million times crafting! Gardening is work, crafting is fun!

Fruit or vegetables? Fruit – they’re sweeter, so you can eat them for dessert.

Motorcycle or bicycle? Bicycle – motorcycles kind of scare me.

I’ve fallen way behind on my CPD 23 posts, so I’m attempting to catch up. Thing 4 was about current awareness and keeping up using Twitter, RSS, and Pushnote.

I’ve been using Twitter for a little over three years now, and I have to say that it is one of my main methods of professional development. I use Twitter to find out about interesting things going on in the world of librarianship (cataloging in particular), and I use it to share interesting library-related resources that I find. (The fact that my non-library friend Chuck says that my tweets sound like rocket science probably means that I’ve shared a few too many RDA-related resources.) It took me a while to figure out how Twitter works best for me. I started using Twitter when I was in library school, and it took me a few months to actually find my groove. Initially, I didn’t tweet too much and I didn’t really find it all that compelling. I think what made Twitter “click” for me was when I graduated and found a job, I felt somewhat more settled in terms of what area of librarianship I should be paying attention to, and I found a bunch of catalogers on Twitter (most of whom can be found on the Troublesome Catalogers/Magical Metadata Fairies list.) All of a sudden, I had people who were sharing things relevant to my work, and people were responding favorably to the things that I shared, and I really started to like Twitter. So whenever I’m in a conversation where people are putting down Twitter (“Why do I want to hear what someone else ate for lunch?”) I tell my story of how Twitter works for me. I don’t think it’s for everyone, and I think that a lot of people use it in different ways, so my recommendation if you are new to Twitter is to give it a chance and explore a few different areas of your life in which it could be relevant.

RSS feeds are probably my other main source of professional development on a day-to-day basis. I use Google Reader to keep up with a number of library related blogs, and I usually start my workday by at least glancing at what’s new. Even if I don’t read everything right away, I like to take a moment to see what’s new in the world of librarianship.

Of the things mentioned in this Thing, Pushnote was the only one that was new to me. I tried it out, but didn’t find it that useful. From the other CPD 23 blog posts that I’ve read, it seems like a lot of people are having a similar reaction. Maybe it’s just too new to really have a “critical mass” of users yet. However, as I said, I wasn’t that impressed with Twitter at first and now I love it, so I’d be willing to give Pushnote another try in the future.