What about the Irish

So yes, what about the Irish?

Their public libraries, I mean.

Well, there are lots, and the Northern Irish ones share one website. One of the libraries listed is the Dungannon Library in County Tyrone (40 miles from Belfast). And it just started twittering and blogging 3 months ago. Which is great for a medium-sized market town library, with only a sparse webpage to call its own. Hello world!

Perhaps, the whole tiptoe into the Web 2.0 waters is because of the library’s growing migrant users who are increasingly tech-savvy. According to its blog, they’ve started collections in Portuguese, Polish, Latvian and Lithuanian for users, and placed them in the hottest spot: the computer suite. I guess the library is considering more than its time-tested provision of physical space and collections, and adding visitorship in the virtual world to its fold. A little alarming though, is the fact that their blog hasn’t had a new entry since January 2009. Oh, don’t say it’s been abandoned to a far and dusty corner of the server.

CC photographed by mercuryvapour

At least the Twitter feed is alive and kicking, even though the library left a rather telling remark last week on April 9th, 2009: “Amazed that so many people are still adding us when we haven’t tweeted in 2 months. Thank you all for your perseverance!” Like the TU Delft library, their Twitter tone is friendly, and instead of the third-person narrative, it’s usually in the form of “we are doing this or that”. Which is kind of like a couple declaring, “we’re throwing a party. Bring wine.” Through their Twitter feed, I learnt more about the library’s heart and soul than from its official website, which states a laundry list of services and infrastructure, and nothing on what makes it tick.

However, some of the tweets sounded more like they represented the personal thoughts of library staff, rather than the library itself. Perhaps, this is abit dangerous from the public institutional point of view, since I’m not sure what to think when the library says, “Between the darkness outside and the students inside, its been very quiet today. Good job I had all this, ahem, hard work to keep me busy!” It makes me wonder if my tax money is being used properly, if it’s to pay staff to twiddle their thumbs at the desk. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt though.

I guess my point is, libraries need to remind their staff that while keeping it real is important in social media, it’s the library’s reputation and their professionalism at stake. I wouldn’t want to play around with that, no sirree.

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