Say "Hi" to @SteacieLibrary

Or not. You can also feel free to subscribe. Or not.

Yes, my library has entered the Twitter age. I'll probably be the main tweeter but hopefully a couple of the other reference staff here will chip (chirp?) in from time to time.

It took me a while to decide whether or not it's worth it to join Twitter. When I do IL classes, I often poll the class informally to see who uses which of the various social networking software sites. Facebook is around 90%. Twitter is around 5-10%, although somewhat more than 50% seem to have at least heard of it. So, it's a fairly small percentage of students here that I could possibly reach -- although York is a very large school so 10% is 5,000 people. And that's why it's taken me a while to decide.

The thing is, quite a few internal York organizations and people are on Twitter and I think it's probably at least as interesting to reach out and connect to them, hopefully raising Steacie's profile on campus a bit.

Twitter also provides a very lightweight way to create an RSS news feed about the library which we could reuse on our web page, for example. A Twitter presence also makes a pretty good complement to our fairly active Facebook page. The two can feed into each other, which is nice. The Fb page has taken quite a while to gain interest, at least a year, so I expect Twitter to take as long or longer to grow into a comparable community.

What do we hope to tweet about?

• Library news
• Faculty news and announcements for Science & Engineering and Health.
• Steacie librarian news
• Interesting or amusing science stories
• Relevant campus talks
• Workshop announcements
• Anything else that grabs our attention.

In terms of promotion on campus, we'll probably put some signs around the library (it worked for Facebook!), RT stuff from other York twitter accounts, announce in my IL classes and just talk about it on campus. If we can work up to a few hundred followers, that would be great.

Like I said, I'm thinking that it'll take six months to a year to see how this turns out.

If you're a scitech library out there and you're on twitter, I'd love to follow you. I'd also love to hear how the twitter thing is going for you. In general, we'll be following back anyone with a York affiliation or any libraries, librarians, scientists, engineers and scientific institutions and publishers. We'll be blocking any obvious spam accounts.