Today in History

Posted on October 4, 2011 by cyndera

Coming up with good Tweets and FB posts for work can be a challenge at times, especially if one has to pay attention not only to the social media etiquette but also to a federal agency’s social media policy.

The National Transportation Library’s collection includes a wonderful book called “The American Book of Days”, by Jane M. Hatch, and I use it quite often to see if any of those dates are related to transportation issues. I also found out that my birthday, April 10, marks the birthday of William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army. He was born in 1829 in Nottingham, England (Robin Hood anyone?).

Today, while hunting for good tweeting and posting material, I came across the web site “This Day in History“, and found out that today, back in 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first artificial satellite.

While that is somewhat transportation-related I thought it was more appropriate to leave this topic to NASA and check for something more down to earth.

So, this day in Transportation History, President A. Lincoln observed the first balloon demonstration near Washington, DC (1861) and in 1992 a cargo plane crashed into an apartment building near an airport in Amsterdam, Holland. The first occurrence is obviously a happier event; however, the NTL has an online special collection of historial aircraft accident reports, which are quite interesting. You can find them on the Special Collections page, along with some other interesting resources.

And going back to my tweets and posts: Last week my co-worker and I held a presentation about Federal Libraries and Social Media at the Library of Congress. Our Power Point presentation will be online shortly. We’ve gotten great feedback so far, so I hope that you’ll enjoy the presentation.

FLICC/FEDLINK Presentation

Posted on September 2, 2011 by cyndera

My colleague Rosalind Romain (law librarian here at NTL) and I will be presenting at a workshop facilitated by the Institute for Library Technicians, held at the Library of Congress September 29 & 30. Our presentation will focus on library technology and social media.

From the announcement:

This two-day institute, the newest offering in FLICC’s series
for federal library technicians, will begin to prepare new and seasoned technicians for the expanded roles library technicians are filling as the architecture of our libraries is changing.
In line with FLICC’s recently released “Competencies for Librarians”, this training program will feature those skills that federal library technicians need to meet the challenges of the latest trends in federal libraries.

The program will feature:

~ ROI for libraries and library technicians
~ Managing A Library: A Technicians Prospective
~ Disaster Preparedness
~ Budgeting for Federal Libraries
~ Library Technology Management and Social Media
~ Library Para-Professionalism
~ HR Competencies Assessment
~ Competencies for a Competitive Advantage

Speakers will be representing a variety of federal agencies including
the Departments of the Interior, Justice and Transportation, Law Library of Congress, Army Counterintelligence Center and the Library of Congress.

Wait … I have to THINK about a FB and/or Twitter post?

Posted on June 21, 2011 by cyndera

Let’s be honest: How many of you put more than a few seconds of thought into a FB and/or Twitter post? Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think that it’s a bad thing! On the contrary, actually … but let’s start over.

How many of you sit down at the computer and think “Okay, what will my two posts be about today?” You have no idea, because THINKING about a post for FB/Twitter is actually hard! Usually you come across something and share it on your wall. And that usually takes a few second. A minute max if you take the time to take a picture and upload it. But now you have to think about something cool. So you proceed to finding something cool, which takes at least 5 minutes, if not more, and then you stare at your screen while attempting to formulate a sentence (no longer than 140 characters, of course) that carries everything you thought about your cool subject. You write it down, re-write it, send it to your supervisors for approval, get it back, get distracted, run of, do something else, come back, remember the email, change the post, re-send it, and maybe finally post it.

(10 minutes later: Sorry, I got distracted by creating a FB/Twitter post … and got distracted from doing that by stumbling across five other things that I posted on my personal FB …)

In any case, this is the procedure that many private and public employers adopt when it comes to having stuff posted on their walls. Usually there are a few designated employees who have access to the sites, and they create content in the organization’s name, but each post will have to go through upper channels before it is posted. Although I can understand some of the reasoning, I think it just takes too much time for the employee to create a single post, and it puts more work on supervisors, who are usually busy with other things (there are always exceptions, of course).

What are your thoughts on this subject? Is FB & Twitter restricted in your company?