Thing 24: microblogging

At SLA mid-winter earlier this year, Stephen Abrams put up the view of all the people who were twittering the conference, including him putting up the blog of al...you get the picture. It was very funny, and a good illustration of the power and immediacy (or should I say the power of immediacy...) of microblogging.

How could it benefit our library? Well, we serve a patron base of just over 300 students and faculty - most of whom are taking the same limited number of classes. I wonder if we could somehow facilitate their team-based exercises using twitter. (I wonder if they are doing that already.)

This might be especially useful to our reserves, which are open stack and self serve...and because of our self checkout machine, which does not self check in, they are also non-catalog based regarding checkout (ie, we use a pen and paper). Could we set up a twitter site to help students keep track of what's in and out? It would only work well if everyone who took out a reserve voluntarily opted-in.