Not such a bad Thing (in some ways)

Hitherto, I have been deeply sceptical about Twitter. The very name put me off -- it sounded far too much like a combination of "twit" and "witter", and what I had heard inclined me to think it consisted of self-obsessed individuals chronicling the minutiae of their everyday lives ("verbal diarrhoea", as someone described it), and celebrity-obsessed fans following their idol's every move. However, I don't like to allow prejudices to substitute for trying things out and making an informed judgement, so I signed up for it. Yet another thing requiring a password -- it's bad practice to keep re-using the same one, so I'd better think up a new one. Whatever it was, it was insufficiently memorable, as I've now (a week later) forgotten it, and had to reset it! At least resetting it is a fairly simple procedure, and doesn't require remembering one's grandmother's cat's maiden name or suchlike. I signed up to follow the British Library, and the Bodleian. Very unenterprising, but this exercise is supposed to be at least tangentially work-related! The list of tweets from the BL showed that tweeting has one thing greatly in its favour, and that is that it imposes brevity! It also demonstrates well the sort of things a library could usefully employ Twitter for -- sending out announcements about events and exhibitions, information about opening hours, alerts for relevant online discussions, etc. However, it's no good tweeting at people if they're not tuned in to your tweets, so I did a little exercise, and picked a small, random sample of Somervillians to look up and see if they had Twitter accounts. Then I redid my sample, picking those with unusual names! I found very few of them. So, I will repeat something I've already said:-- As a college library, our clientele is in the nature of a closed community. I don't know if all the students, and members of the SCR, have Twitter accounts, or Facebook accounts, but I do know they all have email accounts (which the students are required, by the rules of the college, to check regularly), and various maillists have been set up, so I can send out emails to everybody, or to all undergraduates, or all graduates, or all freshers. That seems to me the most effective method of communication.