Rationalising my Social Media Presence

I'm very enthusiastic about social media, and I author several other blogs.  However, they're not all equally active.  At the same time, though, they all represent different aspects of me.

KarenMcAulay.wordpress.com blog is going to be my main personal blog from now on.  Anything relating to my Scottish music research, or continuing professional development, will have its own place there, so TrueImaginaryFriends.blogspot.com, and AirsandGraces.cpd.blogspot.com will become dormant.

The successful performing arts blog, WhittakerLive.blogspot.com, which I author for the Whittaker Library at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland will, of course, be unaffected.  You'll recognise my blogging "voice", but it's done in my daytime professional capacity.

I'll maintain my Academia.edu page - it's not a blog, and I think it's worthwhile - but I intend to do a radical pruning of my LinkedIn pages.  They are beginning to look cluttered
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I can also be found tweeting @Karenmca. However, I generally use Facebook only for family and close friends. That's my personal choice.

Social Media in Libraries

I was meant to give a presentation at a music librarians' seminar last week, but a heavy cold prevented me from travelling to Birmingham that day.  So the presentation was given 'in absentia' by a colleague.

I'm sharing it here for people working in other kinds of libraries:-

The Jungle Beat of the Tweet

I raised some issues about running multiple accounts across different social media platforms.  Apparently this provoked some discussion!

So last night I sat down and wrote another presentation, which I share with you here:- 

Multiple Identities in Social Media

Thing 15: I'm jumping back in!

Thing 15: Attending, presenting at and organising seminars, conferences and other events

Oh dear, I've missed something.  Some Things, to be accurate. Week 11 is where I stopped keeping up:-

• Week 11 (16th July)-  Reflections (Thing 12: Putting the social into social media 
• Week 12 (23rd July) - Filesharing/Collaboration (Thing 13: Google Docs, Wikis & Dropbox)
• Week 13 (30th July) - Organising your references (Thing 14: Zotero / Mendeley / citeulike)

In fairness to myself, I already do a huge lot of social media stuff.  I wrote about it in Sunrise earlier this year, so that's effectively my contribution to Thing 12:-

Sunrise (CILIP East of England & CDG) 2012 issue 1, 2-3, 

‘Social Media in Libraries: Me and My Cyber Presence’ 

As for filesharing and collaboration - I've experimented slightly with a PBWorks Wiki, when I did my IAML(UK and Irl) Crowdsourcing the Celtic Bard talk at the Annual Study Weekend in Cardiff this Easter.  Here's the Slideshare presentation. I subsequently published the paper in Brio - once I'd written it up!  That takes care of Thing 13.

Organising my references?  Ah, I've used Endnote, flirted with Zotero and make irregular use of Mendeley.  But I have two big Word documents as well, formatted my preferred way, and annotated.  One is my doctoral thesis bibliography, and the other is the post-doc one.  Sorted!  Oh, and I use Diigo and Evernote.  Thing 14 also ticked off the list!

Which brings us to  ... 

• Week 14 - (6th August) - Getting involved (Thing 15: Attending, presenting at and organising seminars, conferences and other events) 

Get involved - and keep a record of it!

I network a lot.  I'm in IAML (UK and Ireland) and the international organisation;  I've attended and presented at various events.  I'm also in SALCTG, the Scottish Academic Libraries Cooperative Training Group, and I've just become Convenor. For a long time I also represented my library at the SCURL Disability Group, looking at library support for disabled users.  I've been branch secretary for our trade union, and was a library union rep down in South Tyneside many years ago.  And I've been involved with various other groupings over the years, too.  I've also just finished serving on the Council of the Royal Musical Association, in my other incarnation as musicologist, and I've given papers both at the RMA Research Students' Conferences and at Musica Scotica.  I was on the conference organising committee for that this year, too.

Please can I emphasise here that I am not listing all this stuff to polish my own halo, but rather to demonstrate that if you steadily get on with these things as the opportunities arise, you can amass a good body of work to list on your CV.  If I appear to have done a lot, it's not that remarkable over a career of nearly three decades.  Yikes, am I that old?

Prior experience of using social media? Yup!

Here's the link to a follow-up blogpost that I wrote after my talk at the IAML (UK and Irl) Annual Study Weekend earlier this month: Scottish minstrels and Welsh bards - 'Whittaker' went to Cardiff.

I talked about various social media tools -

• Twitter (of course)
• Diigo
• Tiki-Toki timelines
• PBworks (this is the link to my wiki.  You need to visit the homepage to get your own!)
• Mendeley (a bibliographic tool)
• If I didn't mention Evernote, it's only because I didn't use it much for that project.  I use it often in daily life!