Old library, new library

On Sunday December 27, 2009 I was in the opportunity to visit the, otherwise closed, library of The Netherlands’ oldest museum Teylers museum in my home town Haarlem, together with a small group of Dutch library twitter people. We were very kindly shown around by librarian Marijn van Hoorn, who explained to us the library’s history and collection. Now I’m not going to say something about the pleasant real life consequences of getting to know […]

ReTweet @Reply – Twitter communities

  In my post “Tweeting Libraries” among other things I described my Personal Twitter experience as opposed to Institutional Twitter use. Since then I have discovered some new developments in my own Twitter behaviour and some trends in Twitter at large: individual versus social. There have been some discussions on the web about the pros and cons and the benefits and dangers of social networking tools like Twitter, focusing on “noise” (uninteresting trivial announcements) versus […]

Tweeting libraries

Should libraries use Twitter ? Some web2.0 librarians think so, other people say it’s just a childish hype. Alice de Jong of the Peace Palace Library in The Hague wrote an article recently in the Dutch magazine Informatieprofessional (in Dutch), saying libraries should use Twitter as a means of quick and direct communication with their patrons. The Peace Palace Library uses Twitter as an automatic newsfeed . An interesting question is: how can an in […]

Social networking high and low of the year

Last month the Dutch Advisory Committee on Library Innovation published its report “Innovation with Effect“. The report was commissioned by the Dutch Minister of Education, Culture and Science, the charge was to draw up a plan for library innovation for the period 2009-2012 including a number of required conditions. Priorities that had to be addressed were: provision of digital services, collection policy, marketing, HRM. The recommendations of the committee are classified in three main areas […]

Antisocial Networking

In his post “Twitter me this” Owen Stephens writes about differences in use and audience of Social Networking Sites. (Apparently at Imperial College London they had a similar kind of Web2.0 Learning programme as we had at the Library of the University of Amsterdam.) Owen distinguishes audiences on several, intermixed levels (my interpretation): “young” (e.g. MySpace ) vs. “old(er)” (e.g. Facebook ); “business/networking” (e.g. LinkedIn ) vs. “family and friends” (also FaceBook); “professional” (e.g. Ning […]