It's time: how to get your organisation off Twitter / X

In previous posts on becoming ex-X I’ve stopped short of saying *everyone should* leave the hellscape formerly known as Twitter. Mainly because people have built up networks which may not be re-creatable elsewhere, and they were there before Musk came along, so why SHOULD they have to move? But recent events have made me question this, especially when it comes to libraries, museums, archives and Higher Education.

I saw this post from Kevin Gannon on BlueSky which sums it up about right:

I have been leery about unilateral declarations on what people should or shouldn't do about Twitter, bc I know there are networks that have been built there which are irreplaceable. But at this point, I just don't see any way one can ethically use that site. www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/poli...

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— Kevin Gannon (@thetattooedprof.bsky.social) Aug 7, 2024 at 15:15

Musk is actively encouraging division, and helping to incite riots. He’s spreading far-right conspiracy theories. He’s talking about civil-war in the UK. There is simply no other circumstances in which our organisations would be complicit in using, and therefore encouraging use of, a platform whose owner not only espouses such dangerous views but uses the platform itself to amplify them. Our presence on X is an implicit endorsement. We shouldn’t be there.

So how do you get off Twitter? For what it’s worth here’s what I’ve done with my library.

1: Set a date, and tell people

As tempting as it is to leave now, we need to give our users time to hear that we’re leaving, digest this, and make alternative plans to get news from us. In January this year I decided @UoYLibrary would leave Twitter by the end of August, so we had a clean break for the new academic year.

The long lead-in time has been helpful. I wrote a briefing paper for senior leadership in February explaining why we were doing this, and shared it with the comms group, which led to some really good suggestions as to how to mitigate the impact, more on which below. We also announced our intention to leave Twitter on Twitter itself in July, so our audience there had time to get used to the idea and follow us on alternative platforms. It says it in our bio as well as our pinned tweet.

We’ve since reposted about this news, and have now done a nice little ‘favourite twitter moments’ round-up thread of some semi-viral tweets and nice interactions we’ve had over the years. These were nice to revisit in and of themselves - we’ve loved being there for 99% of the time - and will also serve to get the word out to more Twitter users before we go.

2. Consider creative ways to mitigate the impact on your Twitter audience

What do we lose by leaving Twitter? You can think about it in terms of both content (we tweet about this, and that) and audiences (those people will be fine because they follow us on Insta, these people won’t because they don’t see messages elsewhere).

Content-wise, we’ve had some lovely creative times with Twitter over the years, but as it’s become more broken and less functional we’re really reduced use of it to basic status updates - building A is closing early today, resource B is now available, service C launches today etc. So we’ve built a library status page (which we’re encouraging people to bookmark) that tells them this info without needing Twitter.

@uoylibrary So is #SatisfyingLibraryUpdates going to catch on? Well here’s one: with info on student curators, 24/7, a new exhbition and our sensory rooms which are opening soon. #unifyork #library #sensoryrooms #libinspo #librariesoftiktok #studytips #UoYTips #satisfying ♬ original sound - Uni of York library

We use Instagram Stories (see the pinned examples on our profile here) to say the sort of things we’d previously have put in Tweets, and occasionally use TikTok for general updates too, so of course we’re encouraging our Twitter audience to follow us there if they use those platforms.

[Sidenote: I’ve invented - actually I’m sure I didn’t really invent it and lots of people to do this - a way to get news updates via the video medium called ‘satisfying updates’ where I use the duet function on TikTok to give the students something satisfying to look at whilst sticking around long enough to hear key updates from me…]

Then we come to audience - in very simple terms almost all of our undergraduates are on Insta and TikTok between them so we know they’re well covered. PGTs are increasingly on Instagram too, and more and more Researchers are heading there. Academics are, for us, the problem audience that we can’t reach easily without Twitter - they’re not all going to the same place when they leave Twitter, and while BlueSky shows promise it isn’t there yet in terms of a critical mass of York academics using it. So we’ve spoken to the central University comms team and asked if they’d be willing to tweet perhaps three or four really important things about the library each year (things like 24/7 opening for exams) which they’re happy to do, and we’ll make sure our more internal marketing routes, such as the ones offered by the Faculty Librarian Team I co-manage, step up too.

Obviously your audiences may be completely different to ours if you’re not an academic library - so use all the data you have to try and work out which demographic is most reliant on Twitter for info about your org, and see if there’s any other way to reach them. Don’t rule out non-social media options too - one of the things we’re going to do is put more posters up in the colleges where all the PGRs are!

3. Make sure you turn off Grok data sharing

Twitter recently activated an on-by-default, unannounced, data-sharing setting where everything you’ve ever tweeted can be used to ‘train’ Grok, Twitter’s stupid LLM AI bot thing. You don’t want that. No one wants that. Get it in the bin.

If anyone's wondering how things are going on the hellsite: This setting was just turned on by default for everyone. if you still have an account with content, go log in and disable this so Grok can't use your tweets as training data. Direct link: twitter.com/settings/gro...

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— Corey (@coreyjrowe.bsky.social) Jul 26, 2024 at 03:17

Here’s the direct link to the Settings to turn data sharing off - it works on desktop but not, I hear, on mobiles.

4. keep the account

I’ve wrestled with this a bit - any social media account that is out there in the world is, in effect, a front window for your organisation. So keeping an account alive even when it’s not active is problematic - people may still send DMs which will go unanswered; people could find old tweets and reply to them and we wouldn’t see it, etc. However, I don’t want to lose the account name and let someone else take it and potentially impersonate the library, and there is of course a tiny, tiny possibility that Twitter may one day be habitable again, so I’ve decided it’s better to keep the account.

A final decision I need to make on this whether to lock it when we leave. At the moment I’m leaning towards locking, to reduce the chances of new people seeing the account, missing all the ways we’ll try and flag that it’s not active, and then trying to get help or guidance we can’t give by asking questions on the platform. Which brings us to…

5. Make it really, really obvious the account is no longer active

Subtlety is not your friend here. I’ve seen professional accounts who’ve left without changing their bio - we really need to make it unquestionably obvious we’ve left.

Here’s what I did with my own account when I left Twitter:

So that checklist of ways I’ve tried to flag I’m not there, in full:

• Says it in my name

• Says it in my bio

• Says it in the banner pic

• Says it in the pinned tweet

I must confess I don’t know if this has worked or not, because I’ve not logged back in since I left. I tried recently, to disable to the Grok AI LLM thing mentioned above, but it requires 2FA I can’t get without logging in, so I’m stuck… I don’t know, therefore, if there are loads of DMs or people @ing me and thinking I’m rude for not replying - I hope there aren’t, and I’ve done everything I can to avoid that. I’ll be doing the same with @UoYLibrary in a couple of weeks.

finally: How much do we explain why we’re leaving?

A decision I’ve not yet made is, do we write a library news post where we fully go into the details of why we’re leaving? I’d be genuinely interested to know what people think about this, if you fancy leaving a comment below.

Obviously the pro is, we’re a library, we’re taking an ethical stance, and we want our users to know about it. We want them to get the reasons why. I was speaking to a librarian at another organsiation whilst doing some social media training recently, and she said as a parent she’d be really proud of her kid’s University doing this.

The con is, quite honestly, opening up the possibility of a prolonged debate with some Musk fans, and using up comms bandwidth we REALLY need for other things on the sort of conversations where everyone gets angry but no one changes their mind. (Classic Twitter-these-days conversations, in fact.) It’s also hard to talk about why you’re leaving without sound judgemental towards the people choosing to stay, and we have no wish to be judgemental. So as of right now, I don’t know if there’ll be a big rationale-reveal type post, or we’ll just leave it at ‘Twitter is no longer working for us’.

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Since we announced we’re leaving Twitter we’ve not had any negative feedback about it. We left Facebook a couple of years back - with not a single complaint from anyone - and it is genuinely freeing to be on one less platform. As pretentious it sounds, social media benefits from your creative energy needing to be split fewer ways, in my experience. I was confident becoming ex-X was the right thing to do for our library when I first decided it at the start of year, and I’m still confident now - what’s more we’ve done some really useful things to lessen the negative impact on our users.

I’d recommend taking the steps above, and doing the same. If anyone is interested in the rationale briefing paper I wrote for our Leadership Team send me an email and I’ll share it with you; here’s how it ends.

By stopping our use of X from September, we will be upholding our values, adapting to the changing landscape of social media by jettisoning a platform no longer delivering value, and freeing up capacity to work on more impactful communications. 

Nomadic Librarian Social Media in the post-Twitter age

Do you remember that feeling when Twitter first started working for you, and you were suddenly tapped into this seemingly infinite network of other people in your profession, who shared experiences and ideas and perspectives and guidance? What an amazing time that was; I absolutely loved it.

I got into librarianship in 2006, but it only really came alive for me in around 2010 when I got online. In 2011 I joined Twitter (thanks as ever to Bethan Ruddock and Laura Woods for persuading me that my doubts about it were misplaced!) and really everything changed. It led to all sorts of opportunities, but the thing I appreciate most about the platform is the sheer number of voices it has allowed me to hear - I got so many useful insights I wasn’t getting within the walls of my own institution. My eyes were opened, my knowledge was expanded, my politics moved even further to the left and I changed. Twitter changed me, for the better.

Twitter is now untenable

However, since Twitter became X it has become untenable and it is only the sheer power of the relationships I built over 12 years that has kept me there this long. There is no other brand or organisation run by a white supremacist that I would consider giving my time to; it feels deeply uneasy to be part of something so incredibly toxic, because you feel complicit.

I’m not deleting my account (yet) mainly because I don’t want anyone else using the alias, but I am officially leaving the site from Christmas - no longer logging in or posting. I wouldn’t presume to tell anyone else what to do but if you’re still there, I’d recommend at least considering getting out too.

Need some reasons to leave Twitter?

1. Hate speech, harassment, extremist content and misinformation have all spiked since Musk took over

2. Musk himself has said some abject things, including describing antisemitic conspiracy theories as ‘the absolute truth’, and threatened violence against his enemies

3. Musk has reinstated previously-banned white nationalists and whole host of incredibly toxic accounts which he’s now actively promoting, whilst deleting accounts of journalists he doesn’t like and reducing traffic to news sites

4. Honestly there’s just an endless list of things. Even just researching enough to list points 1-3 above is so bleak, I don’t want to do any more; every day there’s something else awful he’s done, just google his name and you’ll see the latest

So what happens next for libraries and librarians? Originally this one post about both those categories, but it got ridiculously long so I’ve moved the bits about libraries into a separate Part 2. Let’s focus first of all on us, the people working in the cultural orgs, which is the slightly less complicated side of the coin in some ways.

Social media for librarians, information professionals, and others who work in cultural organisations

So here’s a massive disclaimer about this section: it is VERY subjective. (The bit about libraries and social media in part 2 is far more objective.) It’s based on my experiences and my preferences. Your mileage may vary.

I have now been actively looking for and posting on Twitter alternatives for over a year, and this is what I’ve concluded. (tl;dr Bluesky is the closest equivalent to early Twitter, and I whole wholeheartedly recommend getting yourself an invite code if you can.)

Threads just isn’t quite happening for librarians

I wanted Threads to work, so I joined early and optimistically. I followed lots of library friends, plus a few larger accounts, newspapers and the like. And what I’ve found is, my feed is 90% posts from the Guardian etc and hardly any from the library people. (There is apparently loads of book-chat on Threads, but not so much library chat.)

Part of the reason for this is that Threads is unavailable in the EU. So the entirety of European librarianship, pretty much, is absent from the discussion. I love European librarians and want them in my network! [EDIT: since I wrote this post, Threads as become available in the EU! This may change everything and make Threads a viable network for librarians over time, we’ll have to wait and see.]

Threads famously became the fastest growing new social network ever: while Facebook and Twitter both took over 2 years to reach 10 million users, Threads took just 7 hours. There are now 137 million people with accounts - but that doesn’t matter. What mattes is active users. There are around 10 million active Threads users, who only spend 3 minutes a day on the app. (Obviously, 10 million is a large number - but compared with 200 million active Twitter users, or 2.35 billion active Instagram users, clearly there is simply less conversation to be had there.)

So my Threads account lies dormant, with a post basically saying: I’m putting my eggs in the Bluesky basket.

Instagram is essential for libraries but potentially less so for librarians

I enjoy Instagram but I am there as a drummer, not as a library professional. I do follow some librarians on there and enjoy their posts, but they tend to be about their lives rather than their work.

My experience has been that Instagram’s primary focus on video, then on image, and then on words, means it’s not as suited for a professional network in our particular profession (and a lot of info pros aren’t there on principle because it’s a Meta product) - but actually this is probably too limited thinking on my part. Naomi Smith is making the @blackandgoldeducation critical librarianship account work on Instagram, and points out:

There are many people, organisations who are interested / amazed by ideas of #critlib and share similar values especially younger audiences which is the main instagram demographic

LinkedIn is actually pretty good after all!

I have been so sneery about LinkedIn over the years, put off by some performative posting I saw in the early days, and the (rightly earned) reputation the platform has for being a home to the ‘I get up at 4am and have already done 3 workouts and boosted productivity in my companies by 6% by the time you have breakfast!! hashtag #stayhumble’ brigade. HOWEVER I was basically wrong, because like almost all communities, the thing it’s most famous for is not what it’s actually like for most people there.

Connect with the right people (oh hi!) and LinkedIn is a friendly, supportive place where you get useful updates about what is going on in the industry. It’s also a good place to share ideas, with decent numbers of people reading posts on there, and people actually leave comments and ask questions - posting on LinkedIn feels like blogging felt about 10 years ago!

The only downside is it’s almost all professional, and I love a little bit of personal mixed in - I want to know about who we all are as people, as well as what we achieve in our jobs. But basically if, like me, you’ve written LinkedIn off in the past, give it another go because you can be part of the good bit of it…

Mastodon is good, but it’s not quite the Twitter replacement I craved.

When I joined Mastodon I initially really enjoyed it, but several small things have meant that optimism was short lived. It doesn’t look great or feel that good to use - it’s a little clunky - and there’s well documented issues with finding people across the federated servers. There are also lots of examples of being people scolded for doing the wrong thing on Mastodon, though I’ve not experienced this myself.

More than that though, the biggest issue for me is I just find myself scrolling for a long time on the platform before I find content I’m interested in. The conversation just doesn’t quite seem to match up to what I need from a professional / social network mix - and that’s very much a personal thing so you might find the chat absolutely hits the sweet spot for you.

I had an interesting chat with a BlueSky user called Mx Vero who said Mastodon DID work better for them than Bluesky - in particular the code4lib.social server, which leads me to speculate that the info pros at the more technical end of librarianship are more likely to find Mastodon useful, because the are less likely to be put off by the technical hurdles to getting set up on the platform in the first place. So there’s a greater amount of conversation to be had in that area of libraryworld, on Mastodon.

Someone on Bluesky asked ‘why didn’t Mastodon work for ya’ll?’ and one of the answers was this:

“It felt a little like eating something because it was good for you but not something you enjoy”

This sums it up well: Mastodon has a great community but the vibe - I’m bringing out all the scientific terms now - is just slightly off, for me personally. Which brings us to…

Bluesky. I’m all in: Bluesky is the one.

I am only two months in to being part of this platform, but I really, really like it. It feels VERY twitter circa 2015 - not least in visual style as it is made by the same people who made Twitter in the first place, but just in terms of the way it feels and the conversations we’re having there.

The hit-rate of stuff I’m interested in versus total posts to scroll through is much higher than anything since several-years-ago-twitter, and there’s a real sense of a community sharing updates and ideas. It seems to have a good mix of serious and fun.

You need an invite code to join (which is part of the reason it’s not overrun by far-right people) - just ask on your other networks and chances are someone will message you with one. We all get one a week to give out to people. When you get there, say hi!

Click the image to view my profile (if you're already on Bluesky!)

I asked others why it worked for them: Alice Cann said:

“I found library and related people here on BlueSky immediately and there are a core amount of people posting quite often”

Selena Killick said:

“Ease of use and the fact that Librarian twitter seems to have moved here has helped”

…and several others chimed in with similar views. Arianne H. said:

“Once I figured out how they work, I have found the feeds to be a really useful way to keep up with library related conversations, especially Skybrarians. I like that feeds are created by users.”

Feeds are, I think, like Twitter lists but intended as a much more public-facing thing rather than a personal one. Here’s the skybrarian feed link for those already on the platform - thanks to Andromeda Yelton for setting it up!

manu schwendener said:

“Best feature for me: that their roadmap and issues are public”

…and also has some useful guidance on first Bluesky steps, including using Follower Bridge to reconnect with your Twitter contacts. It’s a pretty manual process that will take a while if you follow a lot of people, and it’s a bit hit and miss (if you follow someone called ‘Dave’ on Twitter it’ll find someone at random called Dave on Bluesky and be like, hey I think we got him!) but a good jumping off point. As always though, a reliable way to jump start your community building is this:

1) Set up your profile - bio, pic, a first post - BEFORE you start following people, so when they get the notification of the new follow and potentially click on your profile, there’s something for them to see

2) Find a librarian you like, click on the list of people THEY follow, and canabalise it

On top of all that, the way the community is building organically is really nice. Threads felt like a mad rush, with everyone joining and then almost immediately leaving (albeit not deleting their accounts because you can’t without also deleting Insta), while Mastodon felt like a party that had already been going for a while before you got there, and has certain rules and norms you’re not fully up to speed with. Bluesky just builds slowly, and because you get an invite code per week to give out, people are gradually bringing others into the fold and more and more people we all want to see there are arriving.

Here’s the real test of which social network you most identify with - which profile do you put in your speaker bio and on your first and last slides..? I’ve changed mine to Bluesky. I’m all in!

What is the longer-term prognosis for librarian social media?

The answer to this questions is of course that I don’t know, but there’s a couple of things worth bearing in mind. One is that even if, say, something else comes along in two years that we all end up switching to, two years is a long time! Two years of being a networked librarian able to tap into support and ideas beyond your institution, even if imperfectly, is so much better than nothing. But the other thing is, I don’t think we’ll ever get another Twitter. Not in terms of the sheer focus of dialogue in one place - the world and the online landscape is too fragmented now, so we’ll split off into smaller communities.

I’d love to be wrong about this of course. But if we do end up with lots of options, the important thing is not to let that put us off. Pick one, try it, and see if it’s for you. If it’s not, move on. If it is, go all in. Because we’re all better off for having a way to benefit from our professional community online - I hope you find yours!

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Read the Library-focused follow up to this post here: Where should libraries go now Twitter has become a Wasteland

Where should libraries go if Twitter becomes a wasteland?

Elon Musk has bought Twitter, he’s all but guaranteed to make terrible decisions about how to run it, and high-profile users are already leaving the platform due to the already-significant increase in hate-speech and misinformation. Of course this has wider implications for the world at large, but where does it leave libraries seeking to connect with users on the platform? Should we stay, or find a new home?

tl;dr - in a way it doesn’t matter what we want to do, we have to follow the lead of our communites. If they stay put then so should we; if they fragment then it becomes a lot more complicated.

Should we simply leave Twitter on principle?

A quick disclaimer is that I’m focusing on organisational accounts here. When it comes to us as individuals, there’s certainly an argument that we should be getting out - but this post is about libraries, not librarians.

Ultimately, my view is that libraries leaving Twitter on principle is self-defeating and too selective. Facebook is so incredibly problematic and has been for at least a decade, so if we’re leaving Twitter we should probably be leaving FB, right? And they own Instagram so we should leave that too. Which means we’re left with TikTok, which is hardly a bed of ethical roses and is especially problematic around data.

So do we leave all of them on principle? You could certainly make a case for it - but I don’t think most of us will because it would destroy our ability to interact with our communities. So if the answer is ‘no we’re not leaving all of them,’ then leaving just Twitter seems like a misstep: if you’ll forgive the extended metaphor, it’s like cutting off your unethical nose to spite your face, when the cheeks, eyes, chin and mouth are equally guilty.

What are the alternatives? Is Mastodon an option?

There are a few alternatives to Twitter and sadly I’m yet to see any of them as a truly workable solution. The one currently garnering most attention due to a record number of downloads and new members is Mastodon, which is very Twitter-like indeed. Visually and functionally it’s very similar to Twitter but the problem is, we’re not REALLY on Twitter because of the functionality; we’re there because our communities are.

Unlike Twitter’s single giant network, Mastodon is spread across several different servers with different subgroups. There are regional spaces, queer-friendly spaces, climate-activist spaces - and they all stress they welcome everyone (e.g. you don’t have to be from New Zealand to join the mastadon.nz space). The issue with this diffuse approach is no one group is especially big: so there are 5,000 people on the Australian community server at the the time of writing, versus 3.7 million Australians on Twitter. You can interact with people on different servers, but the way it’s set up we could put an enormous effort into Mastadon but not influence enough people in any one place to see any tangible rewards. However I’ve set up an account for myself @nedpotter@mas.to get to know the platform in case it becomes a viable option for the library later.

The same goes for Discord, another platform often cited as a Twitter alternative in recent days - it focuses on several smaller communities, rather than one massive one. This makes it all but impossible to use efficiently as a library.

As things stand, I don’t see a viable alternative to Twitter. That may change, and it will vary according to sector - so for example if a LOAD of health professionals join Mastodon, it could become a useful platform for Health Libraries to have a presence on. But right now, it isn’t.

If we’re staying, what should we do differently?

One of the key things you can do if you haven’t already is mute more. Go to Settings and Support > Settings and privacy > Privacy and Safety > Mute and block and finally Muted notifications. On the resulting screen you can mute default-profile-pic accounts, or unconfirmed accounts, meaning you’ll be less exposed to mass-produced trolling or bots.

Ticking a few of these will probably help

You can of course mute individual words and block accounts too, or even Lock your account - from a comms point of view though that’s a pretty drastic step to take for an organisational account.

One other thing to note is don’t conduct any kind of sensitive conversation via DMs. You can’t trust Twitter with your data, so don’t DM your users and ask for anything you or they wouldn’t want to Twitter to know - just DM them and tell them you’ll be in touch via email instead…

[Hey while you’re in Settings, why not also take the opportunity to revoke access to third-party apps that don’t need access anymore. It’s good practice to do this on a regular basis anyway. And if you’ve got the patience for it, check out this guide for getting rid of a lot really annoying things about the way your Twitter timeline currently works - no more suggested posts, woohoo!]

Should libraries pay $20 a month for the blue tick?

Hell no.

So what happens next?

The slightly frustrating truth is our next steps as organisations has to be: wait. We have to wait and see what our communities do, and be guided by them. If they move en masse, we can move with them. If they don’t, we should probably stay where we are.

In the meantime it’s worth considering things by sector.

• If you’re a law library, pharma library, or other special library, you can potentially use LinkedIn to connect with almost every relevant person in your potential audience, and ditch Twitter if you truly wish to

• If you’re a school library you can definitely get by without Twitter if you choose to

• If you’re a Health Library or an Academic Library keep an eye on the conversations your audience are having on where they might go - Mastadon may become an option worth investigating in time, you never know

• If you’re a public library… I just can’t see any sort of alternative on the horizon for now. At least Facebook is the really key platform in that sector!

If anyone else has advice, guidance, or thoughts on what you might do with your library’s social media presences, let me know in a comment below. Good luck out there, everyone.

For the last time, Google is not our competition in libraries...

Tweet

There's a very famous Neil Gaiman quote among librarians and lovers of libraries: "Google will bring you back, you know, a hundred thousand answers. A librarian will bring you back the right one."

I found this on Jennie Stolz's Pinterest page. Click the pic to go to there.

You see it on social media. You hear it used as a soothing balm at library conferences. More than one library has it printed on their floors.

There are various different versions of the quote - often people will attribute Gaiman with having said a million answers from Google, and pretty much no one puts in the 'you know'. In order that I, a librarian, could use the RIGHT quote for this article I...

Well, I Googled it. Obvs.

Because how else would I find it? I don't want to put us as libraries and librarians in competition with Google for loads of reasons, but we still do it a lot. I contributed to a SWOT analysis on libraries in LibFocus and someone put the Gaiman quote in there too:

An excerpt from a crowd-sourced LibFocus article - click the image to read the full thing

The thing is, most people aren't seeking 'right answers' on Google. They just want basic or general info. Here's what SiegeMedia discovered were the top 15 searches on Google in 2015 in the US, if you exclude brands and porn (the top 5 if you don't exclude them is Gmail, Craiglists, Amazon, Yahoo [why?!] and porn).

Click the pic to read the full article on SeigeMedia

How many of those have a right answer a librarian could bring back? The weather, obviously - but you'd find that out by Googling it. Perhaps a librarian could find you a more reliable dictionary, that could be a 'right' answer. What's on at the Movies, cheap flights - again we'd at least go online and search, if not specifically Google.

In the UK in 2015 according to Google itself, the top 5 searches were 1) Cilla Black, 2) Lady Colin Campbell, 3) Rugby World Cup, 4) Jeremy Clarkson and 5) Paris. Is there a right answer to 'Cilla Black'? Right answers are not what Google is for. More broadly, people aren't searching Google for things they used to come and find at libraries.

The reason the Gaiman quote includes a 'you know' is this wasn't some grand written statement, it was part of an answer to an interview question he was asked upon becoming honorary chair of National Libaries Week in 2010. The full answer, with the Google part right at the end, can be seen in this video:

What a great quote that whole thing is! Fantastic. He GETS it. This isn't some well-meaning but misguided celeb talking about how much they loved the smell of books as a child in their local library. This is someone who understands how libraries are about social inclusion. I love the full answer. I think Gaiman is brilliant. I just wish we, as a library community, hadn't quite latched onto the Google part of it so much, as the dichotomy isn't helpful.

Also, I don't personally think I can find the 'right' answer in most of the situations I find myself in, even as an academic librarian helping people are who ARE actually after very specific information. Our role is more about helping people find answers for themselves - not in all cases and branches of the profession, but in most - as a couple of people pointed out on Twitter:

@ned_potter Neither would I ever claim to be offering a 'right' one.

— Clare McCluskey Dean (@claremcdean) November 3, 2016

@ned_potter @libfocus wow! no pressure on librarians so. I thought we were empowering people to find answers for themselves.

— Lorna Dodd (@LornaDodd) November 3, 2016

Of course this dichotomy isn't somehow Gaiman's fault or exclusive to him, you see it everywhere among librarians. This tweet from Internet Librarian International encapsulates a sentence you hear a lot about libraries and competition:

Our competition are your googles, apples, amazons who are doing a great (better?) job of what we in libraries do #ili2016 #challenge

— Martin O'Connor (@martinoconnor3) October 19, 2016

(It was reflecting something the speaker had said rather than Martin's own opinion.) I find this rhetoric troubling for lots of reasons, many of which I've spoken about before but the idea of Google as competitor just won't go away...

Here are my issues with it:

1. As discussed above, people don't now use Google for things they previously used libraries for
2. Google doesn't do what we do. It precisely the human element of libraries that will ensure they endure
3. If Google IS our competitor then we will lose every battle, forever
4. Ultimately, to pit libraries against Google is to reduce libraries to their most basic function (provider of information) and indeed the one which IS most easily replaced...
5. ... and then try and convince people not to replace us with Google by telling them Google is not any good, when in fact - for all the troubling things about Google, and there are many - it IS pretty good at bringing back info of sufficient quality that most people who are non-specialists find it to be excellent for their needs
6. Related: no one ever won any friends by slagging off something useful (that they themselves use every day)

The fact that Google and the internet more widely has made it so easy for people to access information without needing to physically visit a library is a GOOD thing. So I'd like us all agree to stop trying to make it into us versus them, and focus more on the things we can do to cater for the needs of our users and potential users. They don't need us to find them info on Cilla Black but they DO need us for plenty else. 

Google could find 100,000 things for libraries to do next, but only our communities can find us the right one...

Libraries, Beacons, and the Internet of Things

A while ago I tweeted this helpful graphic:

I know what you're thinking - it will be climate change that renders the debate on the future of libraries moot, not the singularity! And you're quite right, of course.

The Internet of Things will, hopefully, be a big deal in libraries. Some of the technology associated with it feels very far-away in terms of the resources it would take to implement it, but we've seen how these things work - what starts off as unattainable fantasy becomes cheaply available reality soon enough.

But what does it mean, though? I mean really mean, for libraries? I found this UX article on beacons very helpful in giving me an overview of the technology, and this post is an extrapolation of the ideas it presents, into a library context.

What is The Internet of Things?

In short, the Internet of Things refers to when objects are able to connect with each other online, because they can be uniquely identified.

We're actually very familiar with this in Libraries, because we use RFID. You put the book in the cradle, and that book (due to its RFID tag) speaks to the issue-machine, which then informs the library management system that the book has been issued to your account. It's the internet, but interacting with a Thing! Brilliant.

What are beacons?

Beacons are wireless devices which use Bluetooth (but an especially low-energy version which doesn't drain battery) to broadcast to other Bluetooth objects around them. You may have seen wearable technology like Jawbone or Fitbit, which monitor your physical activity - these use beacons to 'talk' to your phone, allowing you to get information via your phone's screen.

In physical terms, you can already get commercially available beacons - for example from Estimote - which are discreet physical objects (as opposed to something integrated into a Fitbit wrist-band) to put in physical locations, allowing smartphones to interact with them according to parameters you define.

Give me some examples of what Libraries could do

Here are some ideas to enhance the library user experience:

1. Locate items from my books list. Most library catalogues have a 'favourite' function, where you can add items to a list. Imagine you make your list of books at home using this feature, then come into a library fully hooked up to the Internet of Things - as you walk in, you're presented with a map and directions to each of the available items. You'd know before you got past the foyer if any books had already been borrowed, and you'd even be able to find them if they were misshelved. .. Wait, come back! I've got better ones, look... .
2. A self-guided virtual tour. Set up beacons at key points around the Library, and send users off on a tour. When they get to each location their phone plays them videos, or audio, and gives them more information on how to get the most from that area. Combine this with augmented reality to really knock people's socks off. .
3. An enriched Special Collections experience. When you're near the glass case displaying the rare and precious illuminated manuscript that you can't touch, your phone or tablet can show you the whole document in digital format. It could even play you audio of expert analysis by the Special Collections librarian. .
4. Contactless fine payment. The Internet of Things knows how much you owe, and has the capability to let you pay it without you having to queue for a till or a card-reader. .
5. Availability of machines. Some library apps already show you which PCs are in use and which are actually free within the Library building, which users find invaluable. Beacons could easily extend this to printers (and 3D printers), scanners, study rooms, blu-ray players etc etc - all quick to check from your phone as you enter the Library. .
6. More details on items. In the same way you can put a QR Code on a DVD box which takes the user to the imdb entry on the film in question, or on a music score to take the user to an MP3 of the piece, you could give any manner of contextual information on items in your collection via the Internet of Things. If a user is in the vicinity of an item, she or he will be able to get information on it online via their phone. .

My brain is not particularly wired to invention. When someone else lays out ideas I can spark off them, but I can very rarely think up anything from scratch - so with that in mind, the list above is quite small, and I'd be VERY interested to hear what you think we could do with this technology, via a comment...