Thing 8: Communication

It's one of the things we are constantly struggling with as a society - communication. How to get our ideas across to friends, family, colleagues - and now we have more ways of doing it than ever.

Our library has employed email for the last year or so. It's been really handy, especially at a time when we were divided up into teams, and had to coordinate meetings between 6 or so people. We don't have to worry about lost paper messages, or rely on our terrible memories - but there have been some downsides. I think there are some people who will communicate through email only - which is not the way to handle important business. We have plans to use email to send messages about late books and fines, but as of right now, I think we have yet to do that.

As far as IM and texting - I am well familiar with both. I actually have a friend who lives in Ohio that I've known for about 9 or 10 years, but whom I've never met. We met in a chat room a long time ago, and kept in contact via IM. Now that both of us don't spend as much time in front of computers, we text back and forth, and occasionally, he'll resign himself to actually speaking to me on the phone. In fact, I still remember ICQ - anyone else? Talk about old-school! All of my friends were on that back in the day before AIM and MSNmessenger were big, around '95/'96. I really want us to use IM in our library. The posts I've read on other blogs by libraries that use it have all been positive, and I think it would be a much faster way to send a message to someone, rather than trying to track them down or phone them. And using it for reference? Brilliant! You could send links to the information you used to answer the question, or to people or sites that can help them better than you can!

As far as texting goes, I am SO addicted! I have a prepaid cell phone plan, and it's cheaper for me to text someone a quick message than it is for me to call them. Plus, it's fun to send strange messages back and forth with my sister or friends - something I wouldn't bother calling someone to do. I really want a phone with a full keyboard, but I have to save a little to get the one I want. I think the idea of sending notices via text is great. I would much rather get a text than a letter or a phone message, because I live at home and don't often get those things passed on to me by my mother or sister.

I have not attended any webinars. Erm, I may someday, but it's difficult to do at my library, as a lot of sites that use video - like Youtube - don't load. In fact, I haven't watched any of the videos posted on the NEFLIN blog. Before you burn me at the stake - I have read the articles, and clearly am not having any issues using the technology.

Twitter - I just found out about this recently. I know my fave author, Neil Gaiman, twitters, but I have yet to use this myself. One of my friends was telling me you can receive friends' updates via text, but I do not have the right cell plan for that.