When I first joined the London Library in August, I had only the faintest idea of what Twitter was, and, at the time, could not see how anyone would find it more useful or interesting than facebook (which I had spent the good part of my English MA constantly checking for better want of another form of procrastination). I was so wrong. Half-way through my trainee year, Sarah, a previous LL trainee, recommended Twitter to me, and said that as a soon-to-be new library professional, it would play a key role in keeping up-to-date with current library issues, networking, and meeting new people who will be starting the MA in Library and Information Studies at UCL in September. So, taking her word for it, I hesitantly set up an account. Following a rather shaky start, during which I was frequently baffled by what abbreviations such as RT, hash tag trends and other such things meant, I finally started to find my feet. After following a few different accounts (including libraries, library professionals, other library graduate trainees, CILIP, The Guardian, Penguin Books, Waterstones etc etc...and yes, I am not ashamed to admit it, celebrities too [how can anyone resist a bit of celebrity stalking??]) I found that people out there started to follow ME! :-) I have already found being on Twitter extremely useful. Not only have I befriended a couple of soon-to-be UCL postgrads before my course has even started, I am really enjoying following other library professionals and hearing about their experiences in different library environments. I also (and I know this may sound a bit weird, as I'm talking about something which is completely and utterly virtual) find that Twitter offers a great sense of community, of which I am really enjoying being a part.
In terms of RSS feeds, and Pushnote - this is literally the first time I have ever come across them. Whilst I had heard what RSS feeds were, I didn't know how to use them on my computer. Thanks to Annie's instructions, however, it all started to make a bit more sense! After logging into my Googlemail, I found locating Google Reader easy, and was amazed by how useful RSS is for keeping on track of all the blogs I'm interested in reading. Previous to today, I had literally just been visiting individual blogs as and when I had the chance, and I was finding it very difficult to keep on top of it all - especially as I never knew when a new post had been written! Here's hoping that RSS will help me on that front - I've already spent the last hour adding blogs to my Reader (goodness knows when I'll have the time to read them all!!)
To conclude Thing 4, I have also signed up to Pushnote. As a concept, I feel this is quite a good idea, although in practice, I am not sure how dedicated I am going to be "liking" various pages I come across online. Once I start following more new library professionals online, however, this may change! (The only person I'm "following" so far is Stephen Fry...!)
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