Twitter can help library users draw the connection between pop culture, current events and library services.  This is what Rudy Leon argued last week during her presentation — “One Tweet at a Time: Developing Critical Thinking, Library Connections & Information Skills with Twitter” — at the Library Technology Conference at Macalester College.  (Her presentation slides are available here.)

Leon is a Learning Commons Librarian at the Undergraduate Library of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC).  Earlier this decade, UIUC conducted a study in which they learned that: Freshmen are totally smart! And they will circumvent the system in order to work around whatever they can’t figure out at the Library.  At the time, the Undergraduate Library (UGL) system was extremely decentralized, and Leon and her colleagues were trying to figure out how they could revitalize their services and help students.  Fortunately for Leon, her predecessors had already embedded a Twitter feed for @askundergrad into the front page of the UGL Website, and she was able to repurpose this feed in order to centralize information about the Library in a highly visible location.

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Totally psyched to have my Twitter Cheat Sheet ready to go for next week’s Library Technology Conference at Macalester College! So psyched, in fact, that I’m making it available to you, right here, right now. (Just click here for the pdf.)

RACHEL’S TWITTER CHEAT SHEET

Basic grammar:

@username = reply / mention
“@bananasuit Nice bananasuit!”

d username = direct (private) tweet
“d bananasuit Want to meet up and go bananasuit shopping?”

RT @username = retweet what someone else said
“RT @bananasuit 5% of Americans now own bananasuits”

#keyword = hashtag
“I think I’m ready to take the plunge and get a #bananasuit”

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My colleague (& partner in crime) and I are currently putting the final touches on the workshop we’ve been preparing for the Library Technology Conference at Macalester College in St. Paul, MN, in little over a week.  We’re giving a 90 minute hands-on workshop called “Second Life and Twitter for Librarians: Virtual Tools for Building Local and Global Networks.” Angela will be speaking about Second Life,and I will be speaking about Twitter.

I’m excited, but also pretty nervous!

I’m really looking forward to visiting Macalester, which is where I earned my undergraduate degree.  Sad, though, that my most favorite professors have all already retired or moved on to other Universities.  It really wasn’t that long ago, guys!

Anyway, I will surely be posting more about the conference before, during and after the fact.  Next Wednesday March 10, SLIS is hosting a dry-run of our workshop at noon in the U of I Main Library Computer Lab 3092, with cookies!

(click here to see more links for LibTech 2010)