Let the great catch up begin... starting at Things 3 and 4

Ahh, RSS feeds. I am no luddite. I have been aware of RSS feeds for a long time and have indeed encouraged many students, colleagues and friends to use them for particular purposes. But I have never ever used them myself. I don't even know why. I use Twitter (more of that in a minute), I use Facebook, I use a range of media that act in a similar way to RSS feeds in gathering information and providing it in a feed. I have many friends and interesting library people that blog, but up to now I have always just clicked onto their blog now and again, or found out about new posts through Twitter etc. My bookmark list of blogs is quite long. I can only assume it is laziness. So now I have subscribed to all the Cam23 participants, and will work through my bookmarks list to add others.

Now I have to sit back and see whether RSS works for me. If it doesn't I suspect the problem will be with how often I look at my feed, and how many blogs I have on it. I oscillate wildly in terms of the amount of time and frequency I spend on social media (which I count RSS as in my categories), so I may miss so fab posts because they slide down before I see them. But we shall see... I've taken the biggest step by signing up.

So, Thing 4, what do you hold for me? Yay, something I already do!

I've been on Twitter personally for maybe 3 years, and coming upto a year professionally. I maintain two separate accounts in a bid to keep home and work apart, and to keep my professional account free of information on my friends' various shennanigans. My work account is @losbiblio and I'm happy for anyone to follow me, although my posts are at times sporadic, and may involve asking advice of other professionals on a range of subjects. Sometimes I just fill myself in on the latest news by reading my feed, without contributing back. I am definitely more talkative in person than online. I also don't follow everyone that follows me - I filter fairly strongly on @losbiblio to keep the amount of wasted time wading through cupcake recipes to a minimum (not that I don't appreciate the slightly 'offlist' nature of some Friday afternoons).

My personal account is also locked, so I can say whatever I want safe in the knowledge that only people I know and trust will see it. I don't ever go completely bonkers on there, but I like to have that bit of privacy.

We also have a library Twitter account, but don't use it as much as I would like. In my previous post, because I was working in a subject library, there were lots of things to tweet of interest to the majority of our students. College libraries are so varied that those sort of tweets don't really work in the same way. But we do use Twitter for service updates and reminders, both locally and around the University. At the moment I don't feel our students are particularly engaged with us through Twitter, but we'll keep going...