Since then, I’ve presented at LOEX, ACRL and ALA on the campaign and I know of a couple other libraries who are running their own Library Secrets programs.

Do you know who invented “the Secret is in the Library” campaign?

Jennifer

I’m definitely not anti-Wolfram Alpha. I think it’s terribly cool. It’s a long way off from trickling down to regular use by students at my college so I really needn’t worry too much about how to incorporate it into IL instruction. Nevertheless, it’s shiny, new and different; and if “systematic knowledge” does become “immediately computable by anyone” we will probably, eventually, need to pinpoint its origins.

So yes, Wolfram-Alpha is a bit like any other online reference resource. We can accept its data the same way we accept the data in an almanac.

As Wolfram-Alpha moves into beta, I’d like to see persistent URLs for citation purposes and I’d like to see the “for researchers” link return (it was nonfunctional when I first looked at the site, now it’s been removed).

Or maybe… maybe we should at least develop a type of citation that includes the query, because this would make the information much easier to re-retrieve? Always including the date of the query, of course.

As these two lists are self nominated, “Libraries on twitter” (as opposed to librarians on twitter, which tends to be personal accounts), I assumed they were official accounts.

I’m quite surprised that your account which I believe is listed there isn’t considered an official library account?

I later supplemented it with searches for “library”, “lib”, “ref”

For these cases, I indeed had to use some judgment, though in most cases it was quite clear from the Bio which were official accounts.

When it comes down to it, I think whether the twitter account should be included or not is whether it is mainly followed by library users, or if is used it for other purposes say as a personal account to do networking with other librarians.

I must admit, I wasn’t particularly sure your account was official at the time (I noticed the high number of followers) even though it was listed as the name wasn’t in the form of X Library, but it was listed and the link to the library webpage was suggestive.

The line isn’t particularly clear of course, I can remove your account if you want.

I recently added then removed http://twitter.com/yalsa because it was I think meant mainly for librarians.

As for how comprehensive the list is, I think it is probably the most comprehensive list out there, but every day new accounts are added, and I’m sure there are lots out there I’m not aware of.

You are right, I don’t think it should come down to just looking at number of followers. While it is fun to see who is #5 on the list, the main purpose is to see what libraries in aggregate are doing rather than looking at specific accounts.

Now for example I know that about half the library accounts have more than 168 followers, which probably means hitting that target is not unreasonable etc.

And no, I don’t think that this will lead to a frenzy of competition.

I also hope to be able to analyze other statistics, for instance, I notice some libraries are following pretty much everyone are following them with follower/following ratios of roughly 1, while others are hardly following anyone. Seems to suggest different strategies, policies at play.,,

One could also analyse signal to noise ratios (% of twits that have links, hash tags, are @s) , whether the twitter account is being asked questions (% of @s to account) etc..

I suspect libraries are using twitter in many differ ways and this might show up in the statistics.

I blogged a bit on what I was trying to do at http://musingsaboutlibrarianship.blogspot.com/2009/05/library-twitter-league-official-library.html