Twitter, what is it good for?

The CILIP Cymru conference also included a discussion of the uses of Twitter – the discussion was commented on by a live Twitter feed.

Brian Kelly of UKOLN identified Twitter’s advantages as being the potential for collaboration, as an E-business card and as the modern equivalent of the telegram.

Bob McKee identified Twitter as the equivalent of a pub conversation in that it was informal rather than inconsequential.

It was agreed that Twitter would become devalued if it was simply used as a marketing tool or offering an official ‘spin’ to news items.

I was finally convinced of Twitter’s value, although by the time I’d set up an account the conference was over!

Technology permitting I will send ‘tweets’ from the CoFHE conference in June using the tag #cofhe09 and from Umbrella in July using the tag #umbrella09.

CILIP Cymru conference 2009

First blog post using the I-phone app!

The theme of the conference was library space and at the plenary session a number of varied definitions of library ‘space’ were identified:

Heritage (collections)
Community
Political
Virtual
Creative
Physical
Internal (thinking space)

To this list you could also add educational space

The point was made that in Wales there was a clear distinction between meeting the needs of urban and rural spaces.