Hello everyone! 

This is my first official blog so please be gentle with me!

After a very interesting FIL conference, I seem to have been encouraged back on to the Committee (I’m blaming the wine!) so I’m looking forward to being part of the team again.

Well I have finally been dragged kicking and screaming into the world of social media. I have managed to resist Facebook and suchlike on a personal level but last week it became necessary for me to join both Facebook and Twitter in a work capacity. Here at University of Glasgow, we use social media on a daily basis to put library information out to our staff/students. This can be general reminders about our different services, info about new services, changes to opening times – all sorts of things. We generally have one dedicated member of staff who deals with this but recently it was decided that all Supervisors and Managers in our department should know how to use it in case of a major disruption to our service when said person wasn’t around. Oh  joy! So, I am now the (proud?) owner of both a Twitter and Facebook account. 

I have to admit, I’m getting quite addicted to Twitter. I’m fascinated by hashtags now that I know what they are and what they do. I don’t think I realised just how many people were active on Twitter and what they talked about – all sorts of interesting library related things as well as the horror of someone losing their pencil at a conference! So far I am following 12 ‘people’, most of whom are library related (including FIL and BL of course!), and I am also following God which is proving to be quite entertaining! I keep getting distracted by the ‘who to follow’ bit at the side of the screen and end up in profiles of people really far removed from where I started. I then discover that it’s been 20 minutes since I thought I would just check to see what’s new on my Twitter feed (I don’t even know if I’m using the right lingo here!) and I really should get back to doing some actual work! I haven’t actually tweeted anything yet but it’s just a matter of time, isn’t it? I definitely think I’ll leave Facebook for another day….

Right, I’m off to embrace some more of this new-fangled technology. Now, where did I put my Walkman…..? 

Joanne Docherty