by First of all, I saw this on TechCrunch today. I’ve mentioned the use of twitter for reference before and have heard people speak on it at conferences. As always, it seems libraries have taken a back seat. toanswer is a mashup of twitter and answers – exactly what reference should be doing. It seems many of our services are promoted better by others. What we have here is a marketing problem. We also have another issue here – the idea of the one big library. If libraries and librarians came together to offer one centralized reference service, how would we fare against these services? I think there is potential here for libraries but it is heavily reliant on cooperation. We see this happening, Second Life reference service is offered by librarians from around the globe, but I think we need to pursue these ideas a little more aggressively.
I’m off to IFLA to present with Amy Buckland next week. I’m quite excited – I’ve never done any international conferencing before. No doubt there will be a recap of the conference experience when I return.
You’re right – there’s certainly an opportunity there for the likes of the library. Users could twitter a question or comment to the library (@McMaster, say), and have it appear on a special part of the website where librarians or joe shmoe can take a stab at answering it.
As libraries, we are constantly looking for feedback on services – maybe rather than relying on users filling out a webform, we should also be soliciting tweets..?
~a
I love the idea of using twitter for feedback! Is anyone out there actually doing that yet? I have seen a number of libraries using twitter but not for this type of service yet. Let me know!