Advocacy and social media

 Venessa Harris

Communication

In the spirit of professionalism, 21st century communication and communication tools are both raved about and ridiculed. Some say we’ve spent so long patting ourselves on the back for actually learning to use social media and cloud computing that we’ve forgotten the community we work for, and more importantly what the main stay of our role is i.e to serve people information at their behest. Computer mediated communication has been part of our lives since the last century. It is now (in the information world) an everyday ‘thing’. So, yes it may have taken a while for the library industry to embrace online tools, and communications, but we have invested some quality time in coming up with management systems, and ways of breaking out of the echo chamber that have been considered decisions – ones that have had longevity. Certainly in the academic arena, it is the library staff that are constantly thinking of ways to communicate with not only eachother in a more effective and less officious way, but mainly of finding ways to connect with the students or users to make their user experience an enhanced one. This user experience is the crux of the role of the entire University, and it is with that priority value that we as teams, engage with developing simpler methods of reaching students in a direct and succinct way. In the library, this has meant introducing (a long time ago) self issue and returns, document delivery requests, online payment facilities, both off and on campus e-resource access, self help tutorials online, and direct contact to a named subject librarian; in essence some cloud computing has meant that we have been able to reduce access or connectivity to student to a direct link. So you can see, that spending that time learning how to use social media and the like, has been extremely useful, and more importantly will also continue to be. Therefore we should be able to boast of our achievements and start to shout about ourselves (using these tools) and the difference they have made to librarianship/information management. Positive and professional advocacy for what we have achieved and constantly developing both personally and as an industry is paramount.

Communication, Measuring production and trends

In the back office, communication is also used as a tool for measuring production and trends within teams. So for the information professional, the learning and knowledge of communication tools has been essential rather than just desirable. I am using a variety of tools to communicate with my staff. And I am using these tools, to organise and measure production, as well as monitor trends in workloads. On the whole, there has been resistance to some of these tools and not everyone uses them.

The use of computer mediated communication via instant messaging, and blogs has engaged some level of increase in information sharing and efficiency as queries are answered in a more direct way. Therefore we are using these tools concurrent with business process reviews to reduce repetition, wastage, and also to provide gap analysis. This is a positive step for the future of professional librarianship into the next decade.

Normalising the ‘ether’

This brings me on to the ‘ether’ or cyberspace communciations – and I was so pleased to have a colleague reiterate in an infobyte session to fellow colleagues, that this is nolonger considered an option outside of our regular jobs, it is part of our reality; we have normalised it. We have also engaged with it so triumphantly, that we are using it to make sure that the people we work for i.e students or Joe Public, know what we do all day for them.