The Travelin' Librarian

When asked "where do you find the time to do all this online social stuff?" I always begin my answer with "well, I’m one of the luck ones. It’s my job to do all this online social stuff." Granted, I also do it at home but unlike some of you, and I assume most all of you reading this as part of Nebraska Learns 2.0, I’ve expected to do this on work time. However I will quickly add that after "doing" then then have to "think", "analyze", "synthesize", "apply", and "present" on the "fun" I’ve been having to others to show them how they can make the most of these technologies with what little time they have. So yes, I do have fun at my job but it is work too.

But that doesn’t actually answer the question does it. When I’m asked where does "Michael" find the time my guess is that the questioner really wants to know how are "they" going to find the time in their already busy schedule. Well folks, here’s the hard truth: hard as you may look you might not find the time but that doesn’t mean you can’t get away with making the time.

Here’s how B.L. Ochman put it in her recent blog post "The Secret to Finding Time For Social Media":

Here’s the secret: Pick a couple of social networks — mine are Twitter and LinkedIn — and concentrate on those. You can’t be everywhere and you don’t need to be everywhere, unless you want to be like this dog chasing its tail.

The key to all this is "focus". (Man I’m using a lot of quotation marks in this post.) In the Nebraska Learns 2.0 program we’re having you experiment with literally dozens of different online services and tools. No one on this end expects you to use all of them once the program is over. In fact, no one here expects you to even find all of them useful. (In fact, even we don’t all agree on which ones are useful.)

But none of this means that you can get away with avoiding these technologies and still be considered, dare I say, relevant.

Libraries are facing tough times in this economic climate. Philadelphia is closing eleven branches to help alleviate a budget shortfall. Trouble is, studies show that as money gets tighter, people use the public library more. I’m not saying that your ability to blog will save your library from closing but if the specter comes calling, your blog will be yet another avenue to alert the faithful.

Twitter might seem both interesting and incomprehensible at first, but the more your participate the more it makes sense. I know some participants have searched the Twitter archives for the name of their town. What if you found a "I wonder what the population of [insert name of your town here] is?" How about using your Twitter account to send them an answer. I’d find it so cool to wonder out loud to to cyberspace and to have a librarian magically appear with the answer completely unbidden. (Did you know there are ways to find Tweets based on geography? Imagine following Twitter users that live in are visiting your town and then helping them when they need it.)

Is technology, or more specifically online social media, the solution to all our problems? Of course not. However they are tools that are available to us and we ignore them at our peril.

Image: badboy69