Information Professional

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Where should libraries go if Twitter becomes a wasteland?

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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.

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A library social media manifesto

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Last night at quarter-past-midnight, I sat in my kitchen and was live-streamed into a #VALA2022 conference room in Melbourne. The hybrid thing worked really well, more on which below, but first things first, here are my slides.

The presentation

A library social media manifesto

When I was invited to present on the topic of social media I wasn’t initially sure how to frame it. I talk about social media in workshops all the time but that’s a different thing, really - 3 hours instead of 30 minutes, hands-on rather than a talk, and normally quite focused so for example just covering one tool or approach. In the end I submitted an abstract I was not quite happy with, and then about a month later was struck by the ‘manifesto’ framing for the info and asked the organisers if I could change my plans! They kindly said yes, updated the website etc, and so the slides above are the product of all that.

I’ve tried to create something universal, so whether you work in public, academic, health, school, law or business libraries this should apply equally. I’ve also tried to create something that will help libraries feel refreshed and re-energised - some people I’ve spoken to have talked about a bit of a lull in their social media progress, after making some real progress a year or so into the pandemic… Anyway, check out the slides and see if the ideas help you. The video of the talk will be available in due course.

I absolutely love, love, love this sketch-note of my talk from Kim Williams. It captures all the key points and works as a companion piece to the slides above. Thank you Kim!

The hybrid experience

I realised on the afternoon of the presentation that my slide theme of slate grey and yellow matched my kitchen… What hadn’t twigged at that point was that I’d be presenting in that same kitchen! (The main ‘home office’ space is in our bedroom, in which my wife was asleep due to it being 12:15am, so the kitchen was really the only opion for this.) The people of #VALA2022 must think I’m REALLY serious about slide design and always match it to the room…

A slate grey and yellow kitchen

He’s not wrong…

ANYWAY the hybrid experience worked really well for me, and gave me hope for the future of conferences. I just attended UXLibs in person and, of all the conferences I’ve ever attended, I think that is the least doable online - we absolutely HAVE to be in the space together to make it work. So it’s a stark choice of, either have it in person or don’t have it at all. But for most conferences, hybrid can work well and VALA2022 is a great example of that.

I was on Zoom, and both my webcam and my slides appeared on the big screen in the room in Melbourne. I could also see and hear the room audience through Zoom, which makes a huge difference to how connected I felt - when I said I was drinking gin while presenting for the first time, and heard people laugh, I settled in right away.

The other key thing to all this was the conference app. People could ask questions the whole time on the app, whether they were watching online or in the room. I had these up on my second screen and responded to them in real time, which I really enjoy. Interactivity all the way through is always my preference over ‘questions at the end’.

Anyway, I had a great time, people said nice things on twitter so I’m assuming it worked well from their end too (much as I would have LOVED to be there - libraries of Australia, please invite me back over to your wonderful country! Running marketing workshops a few years back in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne was on of the best things I’ve ever done professionally). If you’re thinking of running a hybrid conference, talk to the VALA2022 people, they know what they’re doing!

(And if you’re wondering why hybrid is necessary, read Fobazi Ettarh’s post on the subject, and have a look at the Twitter conversation it sparked.)

Thanks to VALA for inviting me, thanks especially to Sam Gibbard, thanks to the organisers for letting me change my talk details and also for recording the session, and thanks SO much to the audience who came along - making your way early to the earliest session of Day 3 no less, and knowing it was a streamed presentation: I appreciate you!

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So you want to be a library freelancer?

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10 years ago today I did my first ever freelance work. It was for the Latvian Ministry of Culture (of all people!) and within 12 months I’d run workshops for the Bodleian, then UKeIG, then the British Library, all of whom I still run workshops for a decade later, and I was off. I went down to 90% in my day-job and started doing a day of freelancing a fortnight, and I’ve now done over 270 workshops in 16 countries for 78 different organisations.

I absolutely love it. A decade of doing it is as good an excuse as any to write about it so for anyone who’s interested here’s what I’ve learned along the way.

The freelance work benefits the day-job, and having a day job benefits the freelance work

I am constantly bringing to my day job things I’ve learned doing freelance work. The analytics apps my library uses for social media, the PowerPoint techniques used to create our Induction slide decks, the campaign structure we use for our marketing - all of these were researched / developed for training and then adapted for my work place. There’s no better way to keep on top of new developments in your field than to have to know enough about them to be able to train others! So for example, when it comes time to make a video for the library there’s several apps or programmes I know how to use - because in order to include something in a workshop I always have to have used properly it myself.

It works both ways though; the day job feeds into the workshops. It grounds me in the reality of working in libraries with all the constraints that involves. Feedback I get a lot after workshops is ‘it’s so nice to have someone talk about marketing who actually works in our industry so knows what we can and can’t do’. Working in a library 4.5 days a week is extremely useful for the training that happens in the other half day.

The creation-to-delivery ratio is bonkers and not in a good way

I have a selection of workshop outlines which I adapt for each session. There’s three broad categories - strategic marketing, social media, and presentation skills - with variations. Each of those took hours and hours and HOURS to create, and then I usually spend an hour or two tweaking content and making improvements for each workshop.

Sometimes people will ask me to run training on a topic I’ve not done before, and I almost always say no - because to make 3 hours’ of content for a half-day workshop takes at least 12 hours. Planning structure, outcomes, creating slides, planning tasks and activities, writing the booklet - there’s at least a 4:1 ratio of creation to delivery. So if you take on a workshop or training gig, make sure you book in a LOT of prep time if it’s something you’ve not done a version of before.

That said, I always tweak the sessions. I’ve almost never delivered the same set of slides twice - there are always new ideas or improvements to incorporate. Sometimes I get people coming - deliberately! - to versions of sessions they’ve attended with me before, and in those cases I’m always relieved that there’ll be new content for them…

It’s lovely to build relationships over many years. One of the things I’m most proud of is that 39 of the organisations I’ve worked with have invited me back!

The orgs I've delivered most sessions for

My relationships with the Bodleian, LIEM, the British Library, NEFLIN, PiCS and UKeIG go back years and years now, I really value that. And speaking of relationships…

The best thing about librarianship is librarians

Libraries are great, but the people who work in them are better… The community is certainly not without its issues, but in general I find it to be supportive and great at sharing. Especially in the age of zoom workshops, one of the things I love is how much knowledge the participants share with each other - everyone, including me, learns from everyone else.

One of the very best things about freelance work has been the opportunity to travel. Four of the countries below I have only worked in virtually, but the rest I’ve been fortunate enough to visit for work, and librarians are fantastic the world over.

Workshops by audience location (excluding England)

(Includes online)

Flexibility and interaction are everything

Interaction is what makes workshops feel alive and exciting. An audience full of questions and comments is just the greatest thing, and as a trainer I thrive off the energy that comes with it - and it’s lovely to know the workshop is really covering everyone’s specific needs because we’re discussing them. Sometimes groups really have to be convinced that you want interactivity, so re-emphasise it a few times both out loud and on the screen with specific prompts. I’ve done 144 in-person sessions and 128 online - the Chat is absolutely brilliant in online sessions, and I really enjoy getting to hear even more from delegates - tips, advice, examples, questions - than I do face-to-face.

Flexibility is absolutely essential for long training sessions. A session running from 10am - 4:30pm has so much potential to be elastic in terms of timings, so it’s worth being ready to change things on the fly. I usually put in more slides than I think I’ll need, then go into the slide-deck and hide material as I go along depending on how much discussion there is and what people want to focus on - then share the fuller version of the slides with delegates afterwards so they can still see the extra content if they’re interested.

You do not have to do things the way you’ve seen them done before

I can’t stress enough how it’s worth starting with a completely clean slate when building a training session. You don’t need to use post-its, or break-out rooms, or group discussion and a nominated person feeding back, just because they all get used a lot. You can, of course! But choose each activity because it best suits the work you’re doing and the delegates in that moment, rather than because it’s the sort of thing that normally happens...

I’m genuinely honoured to have worked with all these organisations below. If you’ve ever come along to a workshop thank you so much for attending, and if you asked questions or made comments thank you for that (and if you didn’t that’s fine too!), and I really hope you found it useful. I’m looking forward to seeing what the next decade brings.

If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading! And by the way, the Instagram series that was previously running on this blog in 2022 WILL return next time I post - we’ll be talking about Stories: what they are, why they’re important, and ideas for how to use them well…

How to explain academic publishing to a five year old

 

Last week I tweeted a cow-based academic publishing analogy in response to the prompt in the title, and the replies and quote-tweets extended the metaphor so gloriously, so creatively, so bleakly and hilariously at the same time, that I’ve pulled my favourites together below.

Here’s the original tweet:

Before we get into the epic farm based explainer, take a look at this excellent, cake-based alternative:

(It’s worth clicking on @DevilleSy’s original tweet to read the other replies to it, which are excellent.)

So, to the farm.

Someone asked me to explain who is who in the metaphor, so briefly: the cows are the researchers, creating academic outputs, peer-reviewing them for free, and the farmer is the publisher. He’s not even milking the cows, they are self-milking. The weakest part of the analogy is ‘the cows paying the farmer to take away the milk’, which lots of people have picked me up on - I know it doesn’t happen a lot of the time, but there are often costs associated with publishing an article. You might need permissions to use an image (author pays), colour printing costs (rare now, but author pays) there are predatory pay-to-publish journals (author pays) or legit-but-still-charging-you-some-money journals with submission or membership fees (author pays) - and there are Article Processing Charges (author or their grant / institution pays, an average of over 1,400 Euros a time according to this 2018 article).

I am, of course, hugely in favour of Open Access. The cow is paying the farmer but at least the farmer isn’t then charging the cows a second time, and all cows (and even animals who don’t live on a farm at all) can get to the milk whenever they need it. But speaking as an academic librarian, I know that libraries are paying just as much or more for journal and database subscriptions as we ever were, AND Universities and authors are paying APCs as well. So we’re getting there - but the farmers sure are making a lot of cash in the meantime…

Talking of OA, let’s get back to some choice Dairy metaphor continuations with one of my absolute favourites:

Some people picked up on the role the cows themselves play as peer-reviewers - if indeed the milk even gets that far:

That last one! Amazing. Not to mention the fact that the peer-review process often leads to milk being poured away entirely, or kept for so long before being available that it goes off:

Then we get to the fact that despite the best efforts of peer-review, academic publishing is a market, and quality is by no means the sole (or main) driver or which milk gets consumed.

Not all milk is treated equally.

Is there a vet in the house? Because some elitist cows just got burned.

What about that whole murkly business of recycling the milk into ‘new’ milk?

Fair warning, it gets especially bleak now… We turn to the subject of the cow who can’t produce enough high quality milk.

Ooof. On a happier note, one of my favourite tweets is this one from my colleague Anthony. I can’t believe how many Likes this got because it relies on a detailed understanding of obscure and rarely used subscription models based on the number of students on modules…

There was a reminder to sign up for ALCS royalties (if you’re in the UK); I did this with my own book and would highly recommend it.

And there are loads more great replies and quote-tweets but quite honestly I’ve lost control of my Mentions for now! Some people University presses took offence at my tweet and I apologise to them; it’s a glib tweet designed for a five year old so it didn’t go into much nuance… Lots of publishers do great work. They’re not all like the ones we’re looking at through this ultra-cynical lens.

One tweeter suggested my analogy was a ‘wonderful pastiche’ of ‘every dumb hot take on publishing’. That tweet was from… a publisher.

Anyway, thanks to everyone who chipped in - there’s a certain gallows humour approach to dissecting this whole system, which we’re all complicit in, and I really enjoyed just how far the cows-and-farmer take on things could go.

The cow pic in the Header is a CC0 image from Pexels.

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Using screencapture software to make next-level PowerPoint presentations

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I normally record talks I give at conferences, using my phone in my jacket pocket. I have a strict 'no critiquing myself during the talk itself' rule, so the recording allows me to listen back afterwards and pick up on things that I'd want to do differently next time, or things that worked well etc.

In the past I've also put a video up on YouTube, using Camtasia to record me moving the slides along with the audio of my talk at the LIASA conference in Cape Town. I don't think this worked that well because there was simply too many long periods where nothing changed on the screen - in real life that was fine because the audience looks at the speaker, but in a video - a visual medium after all - it just feels a little inert and uninteresting.

So for a recent talk I decided to try and make a version of the slides that would work as a proper video. I spoke at the CILIP PPRG Conference in January (more on that in a previous post) about our UoYTips marketing campaign - York won a Bronze Marketing Award which I was picking up at the event. I delivered the slides and recorded the talk in the usual way, but then set about creating a new version of the slides that had much more going on visually. The actual slides are here, if you're interested, and here is how they evolved for the video I came up with:

Now I've done this, I'm wondering why I can't just do more visually exciting slides anyway? This doesn't have to be just for YouTube. I've always wanted to use video in presentations more, and it's surprisingly easy to do as it turns out.

The tools

To make the video above I used three bits of software. PowerPoint, obviously, for the slides. Audacity to edit and play the audio (this is free). And Screencastomatic for both the screen-capture videos within the slides, and the overall screen-capture of slides plus audio you can view above. Screencastomatic is a great tool, which I found much easier to use than Camtasia. It's quick and intuitive. It can be used for free, but in order to record videos of more than 15 minutes, and record PC audio, you need the pro subscription - this costs 12 quid year which is pretty great value, I reckon.

Here's what the Screencast-o-matic interface looks like:

too.PNG

It's very easy to redraw the box around the exact part of the screen (or all the screen) that you want to record. You can pause and restart. You can also record PC audio as you go, or narrate into a mic. As you can see it gives you the option of recording from webcam at the same time if you wish, which happens in a smallish box at the top right of the screen.

It's really easy to use.

The techniques

In the video above there are a number of techniques (perhaps that's too grand a word!) employed to suit different types of information.

  • Actual video recorded on my phone. (This happens about 25 seconds in.) I recorded a video in the usual way, emailed it to myself, and went to Insert Video in PPT. You can make it full screen, or you can overlay the branding / visual identity from your PPT over the top. I think this is crucial to how easy this is to do - the video can effectively be the background of the slide, just like an image can. You then overlay it with text, shapes, images etc as normal.

  • Screencasting Google Earth. I really like this one, which happens here. How to have something dynamic on screen while I talk about the University of York? Type it into Google Earth then press record on the screencasting software, and return on Google Earth. It zooms all the way in and then, delightfully, spins round the building you've chosen for a bit. I'm going to use this in library induction sessions in the future, for sure.

  • Using gifs. There's a couple of examples of this, but here's the most interesting one. It starts off as a regular full-screen image, and then I used animation to first of all drop the text on top of the image at the appropriate time, and secondly to trigger the gif video beginning (having downloaded the gif from a gif site, and saved it as a video).

  • Regular PowerPoint animations and transitions. There's a few moments where things are added onto the screen one-by-one as I mention them, and there's this very long fade transition between two slides

  • Videos of websites instead of screengrabs of websites. There's an example here, and another example here. In the talk I just showed a screenshot of the thing I was talking about, but here it's a 15 second video of the site being used, which is much more interesting. I'm definitely going to reuse this technique.

The drawbacks

Really the only two drawbacks are that it takes time, and it takes space.

Of course, recording a clip on a website in use takes more time than just a screenshot, but it becomes surprisingly quick. Perhaps a minute to set-up, record and save / export 20 seconds' worth of screen-capture, so not too bad at all.

In terms of space - the videos are MP4 files and pleasingly small. Most brief captures were under 1 meg. The 22 second-long Google Earth zoom right at the start of the video was 12 meg. The overall final file - a 20 minute video capturing the whole thing, was 99MB. Video files are so huge, I think this is pretty reasonable.

So, I'd recommend giving this a try. And if you create a presentation with video and upload it anywhere (or you've already done this in the past) leave me a link in the comments...