Twitter, etc.

You can follow my newly created Twitter account by clicking the button on the right side of the blog.  This a newly-created account for this class.  I have another, private account, but preferred not to share it with the class.

I also experimented with Windows Movie Maker this week, and added captions to a video I took years ago.  Movie Maker is actually a lot more powerful than the last time I used it (probably five years ago), with many more features.  I still don't think it is as good as iMovie or some of the Adobe products, but not a bad program at all.

Weekly Reflection: 9/5-9/11

You can watch it bigger here.

In this video I talk about and show off Twitcaps, which is a site that compiles images posted to Twitter, in real time. There are various things you can do with it, which are better explained in the video.

My weekend was sort of an odd illustration of the geolocation privacy issues we've discussed this week.  I was at a music festival here in Raleigh, and many of the festival attendees, including myself and my friends, as well as the festival's organizers and artists, were all posting on Twitter and Facebook about where we were and what band we were seeing, and what venue we were headed to next, as well as uploading tons of tagged photos and videos (you can explore the fun on Twitter by searching for the tag #hopscotch11).  If you were robber looking to score, Raleigh was ripe for the picking this weekend.  At the same time, the instant exchange of information made the festival more enjoyable and downright easier -- multiple bands were playing in multiple venues all night, so coordinating where to go and what to see was a breeze with social media.

Weekly Reflection: 8/29-9/4

The discussion of drawing the line between professional blogging is a topic of some interest to me, especially as I look at how we use social media at my job.  In particular, I'm thinking about microblogging sites like Twitter.  Despite its use in many professional capacities, it often feels inherently unprofessional.  Conveying information in a professional tone is rather difficult when you have only 140 characters to work with.

And that's not even getting into the fact that sites like this are really designed for a more a casual sort of interaction.  Seeing celebrities and other public figures posting with their guard down seems to be much of Twitter's appeal.  So the question is, do archives need to adapt to Twitter or force Twitter to adapt to them?  Have you seen any good examples of archives using Twitter?  What kind of tone do they use?  How do they strike a balance between professional and personal?

A Blog to Learn From

A blog that I'm a big fan of is The Text Message, a blog written by processing and reference archivists at the National Archives.  In it, the authors often try to relate available research collections to current events.  So for instance, a recent post was about hurricane related records.

To me, one of the best things about this blog is that many of the writers are processing archivists.  In other words, it is written by folks who are not traditionally involved in outreach and engagement efforts.  It is a good example of David Ferriero's efforts to make NARA a more service-oriented organization.  I saw him speak a couple of months ago, and my biggest takeaway from his talk is that in order to provide good customer service, archives and special collections can no longer have just a small portion of their staff who work with the general public; all employees should be service and outreach oriented.  Letting behind-the-scenes staff engage with the public through social media is an interesting way of implementing this.