As I promised in the last issue, I thought about a new column title and finally decided on Emerging Challenges (Emerging Technologies is already taken 🙂 ). It will widen the coverage of this column to include all items which challenge me and other librarians in both our daily and future life, such as the mobile library, electronic media, future of reading, and social media (TTFKAW) of course (1).

Electronic books have gained in popularity, as evidenced by the latest figures from Amazon. It sold 180 e-books for every 100 hardcovers, and three times as many e-books in the first six months of this year as it did in the first half of 2009 (2). Although it is likely that these were only fiction books, the sheer dominance of digital is surprising. Will this development also penetrate the textbook market? What is their future?

A recent survey of 5.360 library users in Bavarian universities evidenced that half of the students have no clear preference for printed books any more, and 37% of participants could well do without the printed textbook, if an e-book was available (3). The UK National E-Books Observatory Project came to similar conclusions ― as almost every study in the last years (4). That could well be the beginning of the end of the printed textbook as we know it. Libraries are very concerned with these developments, because the printed textbook is one of their main attractions. For decades, acquiring copies of top textbooks and lending them out to students was both a rewarding service and a successful business model. Now libraries are struggling to find new strategies for the coming „age of the e-textbook“, which is mainly determined by the following three factors:

1. New business models
Decan Butler from Nature (5) compares the future development of textbooks with the music industry, which dramatically changed because “they relied on selling content on a physical medium, such as the CD.” In the same way, better e-bookreaders “could similarly disrupt the textbook industry.” Like the music industry, textbook publishers fear cannibalism (e-textbooks will undermine sales of hardcovers) and piracy (e-textbooks will be distributed for free on file sharing platforms). For only two reasons they are willing to go ahead: (a) “e-textbooks may offer them a way to cut into the largest threat to their profits: the huge market for second-hand text books,” and (b) if they do not put their foot into this new niche, the other publishers will divide the market under themselves.

One of the companies which may revolutionize the way of selling textbooks is CourseSmart, a coalition of 15 major textbook publishers (6). It offers more than 12.000 textbooks for up to 50% of the price of the printed counterparts. However, the discount comes with some major limitations: CourseSmart’s digital rights management (DRM) forbids students from moving a book downloaded on one computer to another device, and cuts printing at 10 pages. E-textbooks usually ‚expire‘ after their course has ended. Nevertheless, according to a study from the Northwest Missouri State University (NMSU), students like CourseSmart quite a lot, not because of the format or the DRM, but because it saves them money (7).

And even more surprising business modell is that of Flat World Knowledge, a New York based company, which creates electronic textbooks and distribute them freely. Their library friendly motto is: “Cheap prices are the most effective digital rights management.” [7b]

2. New content – customizable textbooks
Even if the content of the „new“ e-textbooks may not change at all, the composition of the content will change and allow for much more flexibility and customization, interactivity features, multimedia, and personalization. “E-textbooks as we currently know them will look drastically different five years from now” (8).

Macmillan, one of the five largest publishers of trade books and textbooks in the United States, launched the product dynamicbooks.com (“the new generation of interactive textbooks”), which allows college instructors “to edit digital editions of textbooks and customize them for their individual classes. Professors will be able to reorganize or delete chapters; upload course syllabuses, notes, videos, pictures and graphs; and perhaps most notably, rewrite or delete individual paragraphs, equations or illustrations” (9). These „Living Documents“ are embedded in a community and will be commented by the community – a changing document, whose data is constantly remixed and reused.

3. New e-reader: the iPad
In 2009, everyone was racing to be the ultimate multi-function device: a convergent evolution among e-readers, laptops, portable music players and smart phones. Now it seems the race is over. As always, Apple has taken the lead with the iPad whose charming playfulness makes it a great learning environment. The operation by gestures is obviously a very human attitude: to understand something by touching it. There is much potential in the iPad for enhancing students‘ learning experiences and being part of the next evolutionary step for textbooks. What device the iPad will replace? Gerry McKiernan and CourseSmart sum it up perfectly: “the iPad makes a lousy computer replacement, but does a great job of replacing paper” (10) and “for college students, the answer might just be that the “device” the iPad replaces is the printed textbook” (11). Consequently, CourseSmart recently launched an iPad application for reading textbooks (12).

Since the end of June, an iPad has been in everyday use at my own library. It has proved highly efficient for information presentation at a workshop. It is a mobile device for convenient and playful use of information of any kind. And it is precisely this very combination, mobile, comfortable, playful etc. that explains its great advantages over the alternatives: Smartphone, laptop, EeePC, Kindle (13).

I can also imagine the iPad being used very well in hospital wards, in presentations or in team meetings as a multimedia information machine, loaded with e-books, reading lists, pharmacopoeias, lecture recordings, videos of procedures (via iTunes U), e-learning tools, patient education tools etc. The Branch Library of Medicine at Munster are already lending out iPads preloaded with a pleopthera of respective learning tools, among them textbooks of course. The next step is just on the horizon: to embed this systematically and intelligently into the learning environment of the students, and merge it with the local curriculum. Here is the very place and time, where the librarian’s expertise will be in demand.

References
1. The Tools Formerly Known As Web2.0 😉
2. Dylan F. Tweney: “Amazon sells more E-Books than Hardcovers” Wired 19.07.2010 http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/07/amazon-more-e-books-than-hardcovers/
3. Leo Matschkal: E-Books – Elektronische Bücher: Nutzung und Akzeptanz – Umfrage an bayerischen wissenschaftlichen Bibliotheken. BIT Online 2009;12(4): http://www.b-i-t-online.de/archiv/2009-04/fach3.htm
4. “JISC national e-books observatory project: Key findings and recommendations” http://www.jiscebooksproject.org/reports/finalreport
5. Decan Butler: Technology: The textbook of the future Nature News 04/01/2009 http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090401/full/458568a.html
6. Among them Elsevier, McGraw Hill, Pearson, Sage, Taylor & Francis, Wiley, Wolters Kluwer Health.
7. Jon T. Rickman, Roger Von Holzen, Paul G. Klute, and Teri Tobin: A Campus-Wide E-Textbook Initiative Educause quarterly 32(2):2009 http://www.educause.edu/EDUCAUSE+Quarterly/EDUCAUSEQuarterlyMagazineVolum/ACampusWideETextbookInitiative/174581
7b. http://www.flatworldknowledge.com. John L. Hilton III, David A. Wiley: „A sustainable future for open textbooks? The Flat World Knowledge story“ First Monday, Volume 15, Number 8 – 2 August 2010 http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2800/2578
8. Paul Klute from NMSU in Decan Butler, Nature News 2009
9 .Motoko Rich. Textbooks That Professors Can Rewrite Digitally New York Times 21.2.2010 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/22/business/media/22textbook.html
10. http://mobile-libraries.blogspot.com/2010/07/inside-higher-education-ipad-for.html
11. CSAdmin: What will the iPad replace on campus? Let’s do the maths. CourseSmart Blog, 28.01.2010, http://coursesmart.info/blog/?p=196
12. CSAdmin eTextbooks for the iPad now live! CourseSmart Blog 11.04.2010 http://coursesmart.info/blog/?p=200
13. Whose slogan, „Easy • Excellent • Exciting“ it in fact implemented.

The iPhone is the most important computer I have ever had – second only to my first office computer in 1993. Back then on a Friday afternoon in the beginning of the World Wide Web, I installed the program Nupop on my PC. Nupop opened an universe absolutely new to me – the universe of discussion groups by E-Mail and Usenet. I found myself quickly immersed into hundred thousands of newsgroups and mailing lists and enthusiastically subscribed to some twenty of them. After a quite weekend, I unsuspectingly opened my mail box … and suddenly my smile froze: “Cling, clong, cling, you have 713 messages!” It took me a day to wade through them (I red all of them) but, for the first time, I had the feeling of being connected with the whole world – or at least the whole library world.

Whereas the desktop computer connected me with the world, the iPhone connected the world with me. Let me explain this strange statement: Today, the Web 2.0 comes with sophisticated tools and great omnipresence, but – in a nutshell – added nothing to this 93’ feeling, at least not for me. That changed completely when I bought an iPhone one and a half year ago. Looking up information or doing networking on my iPhone gave me a second “aha-experience”: Now everything was nearby (in the pocket), and it was available wherever I was and whenever I wanted! No idea has to be put off to a later date, no question remained unanswered, there was no undiscovered curiosity and no longing unquenched. (By the way: that is exactly what the new generation of library users expects from us.)

iPhone Applications (Apps)
I don’t know if you are familiar with the iPhone and its Applications? iPhone Apps turn the iPhone into a sound studio, into a glass of beer, into a game, into a car navigation. There are 120.000 Apps in the iTunes shop, which have been altogether installed more than 1 billion times in the last two years. A study reported that most people use their Apps only once, but I don’t believe that. I installed some 60 Apps and use them regularly and frequently (some are only nice gimmicks for posing). Equipped with Internet, Apps, and GPS, the iPhone is a perfect substitute for my laptop. You can take the whole world of information with you, and the whole social network too [1]. Which Apps are especially useful and noteworthy?

News
My favourite iPhone App is NewsRack [2]. NewsRack is a sophisticated RSS-Feed Reader and serves as my information centre (as every information is RSS-able today). It shows all the news feeds from my beloved blogs, newspapers, TV stations, announcements of our clinic, and so on. It can be synchronized with your Google Reader subscriptions and – most important – it permits the forwarding of interesting news items to Web 2.0 services such as Twitter and Delicious. You may know that in an interactive environment, reading is not enough; you have to be able to share the information as well – comparable with the snap of one’s fingers. The second great advantage of the iPhone / RSS couple: I can read the news wherever I want and whenever I have the time to – usually not on the job. NewsRack is a bargain at 3,99 Euro.
There are numerous RSS reader Apps for the iPhone, many for free. You may like to test some of them as well.

Twitter
Although you can read Twitter messages by NewsRack too, I strongly recommend installing one of the many Twitter Apps to get the full advantage of the Twitter interactivity of retweeting, replying, and direct messaging. Twittelator Pro [3] is one of the most powerful ones and it makes a lot of fun playing with its many features. I have had good experiences too with TweetDeck (there is also a free desktop version) and Echofon (formerly Twitterfon), but Twittelator is my one and only (but with Apps, you’re always spoilt for choice). On Twitter I follow 99 people [4], which is way too much, because some of them post hundreds of tweets a week. So I found myself quickly overwhelmed by over 400 tweets a day – in addition to the 100 news items on NewsRack. (One of the next issues will answer the question if you could omit Twitter or RSS.) Twittelator allows easy retweeting, replying, direct messaging, following, unfollowing, searching, and whatsoever – 3,99 Euro.

Skype
Skype is yet another powerful social networking thingy, it allows you to keep contact, chat, and phone all around the world for free or small money. In addition, my library is using Skype for communicating with our users – free.

Blogs
iBlogger allows editing and writing of blog entries on the road. Embedding of pictures is easy and straight forward. If you want to add a picture to your post, just make it with the built-in iPhone camera – 7,99 Euro. There is also a free WordPress App for editing WordPress blogs, but unfortunately it has problems connecting to blogs not hosted at wordpress.com.

Social Network Portals
In the meantime, every social network community or shop has an iPhone application – it’s like a scourge. Facebook, StudiVZ (the German Facebook), MySpace, eBay, Amazon, each and every network offers its dedicated client. There are also some social networks built specifically for the iPhone such as iRovr and iPHONEcolony, but I have not used them and I do not think they could compete with the above mentioned “standard” networks. A more detailed (but now a little out of date) comparison of 13 iPhone Apps for communities was done by Adam Hirsch in the blog Mashable [5].

Flickr and Delicious
Of course, these two dinosaurs of the Web 2.0 do also have their respective iPhone Apps. At the iTunes store you can find at least a two dozens of Apps for both the photo sharing site Flickr and the bookmark sharing site Delicious. Free as well as paid Apps let you do almost anything, what you can imagine, including basic stuff such as browsing photos/bookmarks, uploading photos/ bookmarks from the iPhone, and of course sharing photos/bookmarks. More Apps for managing bookmarks are annotated at the German iPhone Blog [6]. One feature especially nice to mention: due to geotagging, some Apps [7] are even capable to show you photos made at your very location (Fig. 8). In one of the next issues location based services will be covered in depth – there are one major advantage of smartphones.

Networking On-The-Go
An German blogger puts the Iphonization into a nut shell [8]: “meanwhile, the iPhone is quite good integrated in my daily routine. Thanks to some good Apps much has shifted to the iPhone and is used in public transport in the previously unproductive minutes. Besides Twitter, I do not use hardly any social networks regularly on the desktop any more. The result: in the office there is more time for real work and the flow. In fact, the iPhone has not discouraged me from work, but quite definitely reduces distractions.“
But beware: you don’t have to run to the next Apple shop buying iPhones! Almost every major phone manufacturer offers devices with similar if not identical applications. Look for Google Nexus, LG eXpo, Nokia N900, Sony Ericsson Xperia, or Blackberry Storm, to name just a few.

After 13 issues dedicated to Web 2.0 only, I would like to widen the coverage of this column to include other interesting things such as the mobile library, electronic media, future of reading, etc pp. I’m still looking for a suitable name. If you feel inspired, please email me your suggestions with the label Oliver’s Thoughts!

1. You may find all iPhone Apps for Social networking at http://www.apple.com/webapps/socialnetworking/
2. http://www.omz-software.de/newsstand/
3. http://www.stone.com/Twittelator/
4. http://twitter.com/obsto
5. Adam Hirsch: iPhone 2.0 Apps: The Social Networking App Comparison [URL: http://mashable.com/2008/07/17/iphone-social-networking-app-comparison/ visited 12.3.2010]
6. http://www.iphoneblog.de/2009/03/10/ubersicht-delicious-iphone-programme/
7. Flickit Pro: http://www.greenvolcanosoftware.com/flickitpro.html, Mobile Flickr http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mobile-flickr/id337423904?mt=8
8. Florian Fiegel: iPhone, Social Networks und der Flow. [URL: http://florian-fiegel.net/iphone-social-networks-flow visited 12.3.2010]

Foto: rbmedia / Photocase

Much is talked about library users diving deep into digital social networks, but does it have an impact on the real library? Usually not, apart from users hacking vigorously at library computer keyboards. In this issue I will not write on libraries using social networking, but on libraries abused by social networking …

Recently, the Library Journal kindly made us aware on a new social movement taking place in libraries: Flashmobs. [1] According to Wikipedia a flash mob or flashmob is “a large group of people who assemble suddenly in a public place, perform an unusual action for a brief time, and then quickly disperse. The term flashmob is generally applied only to gatherings organized via telecommunications, social media, or viral emails”. [2]

You may all know about pillow fight flashmobs in public places: In social networks such as Facebook, young urban people conspire in meeting at a certain time for the desired performance. Flashmobs make take place at traffic junctions, underground stations, or … surprise, surprise … at medical libraries. What will the mob do there? Sometimes they hold „silent dance parties“ in order not to disturb the peace in the library. At the Carleton College library they gathered at an appointed time and place, and dance (silently) with headphones, listening to music synchronized to a starting signal. [3] They just looking for fun, enjoying themselves, making just these sort of things, which are prohibited by these stubborn librarians: noise, music, singing, dancing to ghetto blasters (on desks), sweating in crazy dresses, e.g. all kind of nonsense! Afterwards it was put on YouTube.

What is the motivation for flashmobs? Quite often, stress is mentioned, especially in the exam weeks. The extended library opening hours made long nights of learning possible – stress may be bottled up. Looking for an outlet, the library is a perfectly suited victim: Firstly, as professors do, they force people to learn, learn, learn. And secondly, librarians are always saying “shshsh…”!

Libraries and stress prevention
Libraries are not the bad guys, they have a lot to offer in terms of stress prevention:

• Usually they have sweets & coffee automated machines, as well as plenty of text books, even e-books which you could say is the best learning environment one could by for money. The staff is well trained to be polite and competent, but not pushy.
• Some libraries do a lot more: for example, the Branch Library of Medicine, Münster, has a rest room, equipped with couches on which students may have a nap. [4]
• The Medical Library of the University of Queensland, Brisbane, provides flexible furniture which can be transformed by users from “group furniture” to “individual furniture”. In a way, students can create their own library, suitable for their needs. The library defined different user groups, and offered special designed spaces for each: spaces for extroverts, spaces for voyeurs, for introverts, etc pp. Since refurbishment took place, library usage has doubled. [5]
• The Alvin Sherman Library, Fort Lauderdale, offered sophisticated services to help their students relax while preparing for final exams: There was a ‘Zen Zone’, where students received free services such as yoga, guided meditation and massages. Other services included tutoring, reference help, resume help and a gaming room. [6]
• Would it be a good idea to offer a “stress prevention library disco” too? Really, I don’t know.

What should libraries learn from flashmobs?

1. Security Issues
Flashmobs are not altogether safe. Large gatherings of people have their own dynamics; as with football stadiums, railings may crash, and mass panics may arise. For example, take a look at the flashmob arranged by US students in libraries: Hundreds if not thousands students gather “to have a flash mob rave on the night before finals … to help relieve all the stress”. [7, 8] You could become anxious for students and libraries as well. I’m quite ambivalent how to react: do you:

• Get the police?
• Trigger the fire alarm?
• Make an evacuation call?
• Just sit there and try to relax as it will end soon either way?

I hope that something like this will never happen at my library…

2. Marketing
On the other hand, flashmobs are ingenious tools for activating people. Maybe the library could use some of the underlying viral techniques for marketing their services. Think on services which badly need attraction, on polls, on demonstrations, on every kind of action where the library needs support by many people (not necessary users). Flashmobs (or Smartmobs) could be used for gathering interest, for getting attention, for kick off services. A beautiful example of such a flashmob is the one done by the students of the medical faculty of the Charité Berlin for celebrating the extension of opening hours of the Central Medical Library [9]. Why is it that libraries do not use the fascinating combination of videos, crowds, and music more often for marketing purposes? Wouldn’t it be great to be for once just an incredible cool library?

1. Josh Hadro: “As Finals Approach, Students De-Stress at Library Dance Parties” Library Journal, 10. Dec. 2009 [URL: http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6711077.html]
2. Wikipedia: “Flash Mob” [URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_mob]
3. Casey Wolf/seedubbayou: “Stress at Carleton College” 3. Dec. 2009 [URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKhDmAAiE0E]
4. Branch Library of Medicine, Münster: “Mal Ausruhen vom Lernen? Der neue Ruheraum macht’s möglich!“ 23. June 2009 [URL: http://www.uni-muenster.de/ZBMed/aktuelles/1560]
5. Heather Todd: “Library spaces – new theatres of learning: a case study” Presentation at the EAHIL Conference in Helsinki, 26. June 2008 [URL: http://eahil2008.blogspot.com/2008/06/thursday-plenary-session.html]
6. Annarely Rodriguez: “Library Helps Students Relax During „Crunch Time“ In: The Current Newsletter 19(26) 14. Apr. 2009. page 5 [URL: http://issuu.com/thecurrent/docs/volume_19_issue_26_web_site]
7. skyrepsol: “JMU East Campus Library flash mob rave (Complete highlights)” 7. Dec. 2009 [URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdfmO8iurCE]
8. cackalacky789: UNC Chapel Hill UL Flash Mob Rave 9. Dec. 2008 [URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ruEMaDZWRcs]
9. PublicFSI: “Länger ist besser – Flashmob” 18. June 2009 [URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TYyeHfm4_M, not available any more]

Contrary to the statements I made in the last issue, I’m now – slightly – optimistic that Twitter makes sense. In the meantime, I have 160 followers on twitter.com/obsto, 43 on twitter.com/zbmed (unfortunately not any library user, I’ll come back to this later) and 26 on my private account. The number of your followers is the unerring impact factor of Twitter – 160 is not that much, the vanities in the library twittersphere (@librarycongress, @nypl) do have some thousands followers and real celebrities such as @google or @kevinrose run in the hundreds of thousands if not millions of followers.

The number of my postings in Twitter (remember, they’re called “tweets” or “updates”) grew to almost 400. Do not be under the impression that I have stopped working for my library – This was all done within the blink of an eye. To write your message in 140 characters or less is not as easy as it sounds, but you get accustomed and after some weeks it is far quicker and more convenient than to blog or write emails. In addition, with twitterfeed.com, I redirected my whole weblog postings to twitter – and I had nothing to do at all.

Don’t get confused
The only thing you have to keep in mind is, where you write what and to which source it will be redirected. That of course is true for the Web 2.0 in general: The tools are easy and straight forward, but if you redirect and forward your posts via Mashups to other social cites, it will get far more complicated. For example: do you write a wordpress blog? The plugin “Twitter Tools” [1] will post your blog entries automatically to your Twitter account. So far, so good. But Twitter Tools allows also the other way around: it will post your Tweets in the blog! Now beware: if you activate both options by mistake, both tools will run amok and pass on the entries to each other in eternity. Due to be networked/mashable character of the Web 2.0 this may happen with every tool. It is easy to lose track of the many Web2.0 sites, which you are using.

Is Twitter essential?
Twitter is certainly an important way to stay current on a lot of topics. Experts are twittering in many fields and can be followed. By selecting the people you’re following and by grouping them you can optimize your information gathering scheme. To follow too many people can be quite a hassle, so keep it small and simple. RSS makes looking for information far more comfortable, but maybe that’s because I’m already accustomed to it and follow only a hand-graded few resources.
On the other hand, Twitter is perfectly suited for libraries to get the news out. As I told before, its shortness and quickness aid the whole process of information pushing. And it’s a great advantage that you know your audience (your followers) by name.

Who follows you?
If I take a closer look on the 43 people who are following our library on Twitter, I have to confess that actually no-one is a user of our library. Guessing at the attitude of our students and doctors (I could easily perform a survey but I’m anxious), only 1% are using Twitter right away. It’s very much the same with RSS – nobody knows and nobody cares. Either the library is years ahead in using modern technology/Web2.0 or we are simply doing the wrong thing at the wrong time…

Nevertheless, the single most important parameter for successful twittering is to get your clients to follow you. Anne from the University of Hamburg [2] tells us, how this could be achieved:

• Identify a few Alpha Twitterers and made them to follow you.
• Look who is on the Web2.0-train; among science bloggers there are certainly many Twitterers.
• Announce your Twitter activities on your website, which usually attracts followers.
• To follow someone can be useful if you know him personally or he twitters on your library or you had responded to a tweet of his/her (actually most Twitterers are female – not surprisingly 😉 ).
• You can even turn into conversations; for instance if something is asked, and you as a library knows the answer, then just answer it.
• Take a look at your neighbourhood (see below).

Twitter Tools
How do you find fellow twitters in your neighbourhood? I was too lazy to look up Google and struggle through the results, so I simply twittered this question. Not surprisingly, I received hand-chosen results within minutes: One recommended nearbytweets.com, the other tweetmondo.com (but beware, they will tweet for you!). The third one works best for me: search.twitter.com (search with “near:Münster within:15km”) is great and seemingly quite customizable. Today I joined the group “Münster” at twittgroups.com, which organizes Twitter-like groups for universities and cities.

If you are too busy for Twitter or subscribe to hundreds of people, Twitter for busy people [3] lets us keep the persons, which you are following, quite organized.

1. http://alexking.org/projects/wordpress
2. http://log.netbib.de/archives/2009/06/23/bibliotheks-gewitscher-zum-erfolg-bringen/
3. http://www.twitterforbusypeople.com/index.html

I recently came across Twitter and gave it a try. I ended up with mixed feelings and therefore would like to give you some of my thoughts on this universe of fast and endless messages. Twitter is often defined as micro-blogging[1] or continuous chatting. Each “micro-blog post” or message is limited to 140 characters. Sending and receiving messages is for free. The Twitter social network results from your subscription to messages of other users and their subscriptions to your’s. Contrary to Facebook this can be highly asymmetric[2], as messages of some users are subscribed by hundred thousands whereas they subscribe to only a handful other people. Despite this subscription thing, your messages can be red by anyone worldwide and will be found by Google too.

To fully perceive what Twitter is all about, as with every new Web 2.0 stuff you have to experience it by yourself. Dig in the twitter ocean and literally “twitter at the top of your voice”. Therefore I strongly recommend that you do two things to become a twitter expert yourself, in that very order: First, open up a Twitter account at www.twitter.com, look up some people to follow (I suggest the usual suspects: davidrothman, digicmb, giustini, krafty, mlrethlefsen[3] … don’t follow too many people in the beginning). After a while lurking write your own tweets and see what happens.

To have a say in Twitter, you need to learn some Twitterspeak:

• Tweets: Each Twitter message is called a “tweet”.
• Following: If you subscribe to someone’s tweets it means you’re “following” him.
• Followers: People who subscribed to your tweets (in Facebook they are called “Fans”).
• #hashtag: Like in blogs, tweets can be tagged using keywords. Because in Twitter the tags are started with the hash sign (#), the tags are called hashtags.
• @username: You can address messages to certain users by writing their name starting with the @-sign. This is regarded as a reply, but of course anybody can read this message.

Fortunately there are many Twitter tools which make twittering more comfortable: If you are already writing a blog you can redirect your blog posts to become Twitter messages. You can reuse your tweets in Facebook or make RSS feeds out of them. [4]

Is Twitter just a gimmick?
If you look randomly at tweets you may get the feeling, that it’s an incredible bunch of personal, irrelevant banalities. It is the same with blogs. And again, mass media experts are highly critical about Twitter as they were prejudiced about blogs. But if you dig deeper, you may find precious pearls hidden in the vast ocean of blogs and the same holds true for Twitter. There is one difference: The blogger who posts rarely, if ever, private things will be more intimate on Twitter. The medium changes the message.

Twitter can be successfully used for…
Did you know that Twitter is the third biggest social network site on earth after Facebook and MySpace? How can libraries use this great portal successfully?

• Keep you up-to-date. Twitter is much more current than any other media and does a better job of getting news out, but remember that the needle maybe somewhat smaller (140) and the haystack has the size of the earth. Twitter makes it easy to recognize trends and ask questions: “What are people talking about right now?” You simply don’t get this material using the dinosaur search engines like Google.[5]
• Keep and get you in connection. When you follow a twitter guy, he will notice it and maybe as a result he follows you. So you get in contact with people, which allows you to quickly identify experts. Mashups like twitnest[6] and Mailana[7] will show you relationship networks between users and who is where interested on what (Fig.1: Mailana graph of people discussing the term “medlib”).
• Spread the word. The Research Medical Library at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center[8], twitter name: MDAndersonLib, posts regularly news about the library and has over 100 followers. lindyjb publishes an impressive list of hundreds “Libraries on Twitter”.[9]
• Live-twitter conferences (@mla2009), surgical procedures (#twor), or make real-time satisfaction surveys with immediate follow-up for problem resolution.[10]
• For more ideas take a look at Phil Bradley’s weblog: Using Twitter in libraries5, Twitter for Librarians: The Ultimate Guide[11], and iLibrarian: A Guide to Twitter in Libraries.[12]

Should I use Twitter?
Please notice, that the cost of being a technology evangelist can easily outstrip the received value.[13] Using Twitter can easily be addictive and eat up your day. Nevertheless I believe that as information professionals at least we have to know something about these new tools of communication. And now I would like to unveil the second thing you have to do to become an Twitter expert: watch the Current News video “Twouble with Twitter” from Super_Josh.[14] I hope it shakes your brain like it shook mine. Afterwards you will understand Twitter a lot better for sure.

________________________________________
[1] For a list of micro-blogging services go to Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro-blogging
[2] http://bokardo.com/archives/relationship-symmetry-in-social-networks-why-facebook-will-go-fully-asymmetric/
[3] Or follow the “GroupTweet for Medical Libraryfolk”, twitter name: medlibs. BTW: My favourite blogger, T Scott Plutchak, doesn’t twitter apparently, which makes him even more pleasant 😉
[4] twitterfeed.com, http://alexking.org/projects/wordpress/readme?project=twitter-tools
[5] http://philbradley.typepad.com/phil_bradleys_weblog/2009/01/using-twitter-in-libraries.html
[6] http://twitnest.appspot.com/nest/index.html
[7] http://twitter.mailana.com/
[8] http://www3.mdanderson.org/library/ and http://twitter.com/MDAndersonLib
[9] http://lindyjb.wordpress.com/2009/01/10/libraries-on-twitter-updated-list/
[10] http://www.kraftylibrarian.com/2009/01/twitter-in-health-care.html
[11] http://www.collegeathome.com/blog/2008/05/27/twitter-for-librarians-the-ultimate-guide/
[12] http://oedb.org/blogs/ilibrarian/2007/a-guide-to-twitter-in-libraries/
[13] Dean Giustini: “Technology Evangelist? Well Yes & No” [http://blogs.ubc.ca/dean/2009/03/technology-evangelist-well-yes-no]
Bryan P. Bergeron: “The costs of being first: Can you afford to be a technology pioneer?” Postgraduate Medicine 105(3) 1999 [http://www.postgradmed.com/index.php?art=pgm_03_1999?article=644]
[14] http://current.com/items/89891774/twouble_with_twitters.htm