Cultural Heritage

Nicola McNee is worried. Nicola, a school librarian in Bath, has written a blog post in which she bluntly states that she is “worried .. will my job exist in 2020?“.

Nicola wrote her post following the publication of the KPMG Report – Payment For Success report (PDF format) which was commissioned by the new Coalition Government and suggested Public Libraries could be run by volunteers.

Unlike some of responses to this report I have read which felt there is no value in volunteers Nicola feels that  ”there are many things that volunteers can do in community libraries” but goes on to add that “there are a lot more things they cannot do and without the supporting skills of professional librarians everything soon falls apart“.

But how should a better understanding of the skills which professional librarians posses be articulated? In light of CILIP PR initiative called “One Minute Messages” Nicola has proposed that  librarians and information professionals use Twitter to summarise the wide range of skills that librarians use in their jobs.

Nicola illustrated what she means by this with her initial tweet which she posted on Saturday:

I’m a librarian and I teach students to use resources on the web #CILIP1 http://trunc.it/8r4gg

and followed this with:

I’m a librarian and I help boys to enjoy reading http://trunc.it/8oz6y #CILIP1 #cilipfuture

On Sunday I noticed lots of tweets with the #cilip1 tag (which provides the connection with the One minute message campaign) and created a TwapperKeeper archive for the tag. Using the Summarizr service (which provides a variety of statistics of tweets captured by TwapperKeeper) I  viewed the statistics for use of the CILIP1 tag.

As can be seen in just over 24 hours (on Saturday and Sunday when we should have been watching the football!) there had been 103 tweets from 38 Twitter users.

Summarizr also provides a tag cloud of the words used. This should provides a quick picture of the attributes which professional librarians feel  represent their strengths and the value they can provide.

Coincidentally on Saturday I also created a TwapperKeeper archive or the Times Higher Educations #loveHE campaign. Viewing the Summarizr statistics for this campaign I find 171 tweets from 111 users (although this seems to include tweets only from 7 June and not the launch of the campaign).

On this initial evidence this suggests that Nicola’s one-woman campaign may potentially be able to be as effective as a national campaign organised by a well-known professional newspaper.

Let’s hope this campaign continues to grow.  If you are a librarian or information professional and use Twitter you have an ideal opportunity to join Nicola in crowdsourcing your unique skills mix. And if you don’t have a Twitter account now’s the ideal opportunity to sign up and join in with your colleagues.

So if you’re a librarian or information professional what do you think of Nicola’s idea? Will you join in?