Is Twitter a useful communication tool for health librarians?

Dean Giustini and Mary-Doug Wright have published a useful article describing the potential benefits and possible pitfalls of using Twitter by health librarians. The article was published in last Winter's edition of the Journal of the Canadian Health Librarians Association. You can dowload the PDF here.

Twitter is representative of a new generation of information tools—including handhelds and mobiles like the iPhone and BlackBerry—that help to promote ambient information access and on-the-go communication through a phenomenon called "microblogging".

"School teachers are beginning to experiment with microblogging as are academics. Microblogging is starting to gain some currency in all kinds of educational contexts. As a professional development tool, we believe that Twitter can play a role in informal “on-the-fly” learning in the workplace, particularly for health librarians who work in isolation."

Medical library twitterers can join the group tweet MedLib Geeks (http://twitter.com/medlibs)and keep up with changes to PubMed, upcoming health care events, and news about biomedical and health databases. Further, health libraries share information about new programs and alert each other about new Web resources.

Twittering Librarians

While I am personally still trying to figure out Twitter and how to best use it to further our cause, I stumbled across a directory of Twittering Librarians, joined and decided to share it here.

We Will Be Here for You

A short and to the point video made by Jakub Dajc for the SLA Centennial Anniversary Video Contest

Librarians - 24/7

Can get enough of the library in your work? How about reading about librarians? I'm sure all the interesting and unusual characters you encounter in your work days -on both sides of the desk- are in these novels.

Thanks to the Library Mistress, Monika Bargmann, for creating an amazing list of novels and some films about female librarians, archivists and booksellers, etc. Most entries are in English, but for those in German, there's always Babel Fish. If you recall the German you took in high school or college and just need a little help, here's an wonderful dictionary