Reflection on Thing 18

Having promised to restart my reflective thinking and posting, it would be a real shame if I didn't do that.

Thinking reflectively about Thing 18 - well to be honest, I completed Thing 18 before 17. Although I didn't post it until today, I actually completed it at the beginning of October. I haven't thought about it much since then except every now and again, I thought I better complete 17 before posting 18. Sitting down now to reflect about it is tough, It seems so long ago so this might be a bit of superficial reflective thinking rather than the deep thinking that Thing 17 highlighted,

When I looked at Thing 18, I immediately thought 'not another account'.  Signing up for another account means one more to manage, one more to remember login details for and/or one more not to use. When I eventually got down to looking at it, we had been talking about instagram accounts in work so I could see the potential benefit of this Thing. Also when I re-read the instructions and looked at all the documents, I figured out that perhaps I already had a flickr account because of my yahoo account. Who knew!

Well obviously I didn't but thankfully Rudai 23 did.

As I mentioned in Thing 18, I'm a word person rather than a picture/photo person. I prefer dealing with words and really don't have alot of photos on display.  So immediately I put another mental block up - 'not only another account, but one on photos! I don't even use photos.' But that's not in the spirit of Rudai 23. Thing 18 forced me to look at photos and at the accounts of other equitable academic libraries. It highlighted to me how others were using social media and how we might use it in my library.

Currently we have to be careful what platforms we get involved in - we can only manage so much as it is inter-twined with our daily jobs. We don't have a dedicated social media person. The result is that we concentrate on twitter and facebook as this seems to be the best way to reach our customers. Maybe we're missing part of our potential audience.

Despite looking at the photos and part of the task to download a photo for Thing 18....and attribute it correctly, I'm still not 100% sure about using or attributing photos. I'm still anxious about getting it wrong. I have high hopes for Thing 19.