INLS 490-121: Collaborative Writing Exercise/Twitter

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Ephemera

The term ephemera usually refers to paper items such as tickets, posters, leaflets, etc. that were intended to be used for a short period and then discarded. Merriam-Webster defines ephemera as "something of no lasting significance." But who decides what has significance and what doesn't?

Before: ephemera as inessential

Before the digital revolution, space was at a premium. Bound books take up a lot of room, but they have a perceived worth; the scarcity of the items made them commodities. The majority of a "traditional" library's collection is going to be published books which have gone through a process of being written, submitted to a publisher, edited, printed in volume, and so on.

Now: everything is digitized

Materials that fall outside of that category are oftentimes not collected because they are not deemed worthy enough to take up the space. But now, space is cheap--digitally at least. A flash drive you can buy for $10 at the grocery store checkout lane has more space than the entire hard drive of the Packard Bell (don't laugh) computer I bought in 1996. A terabyte of storage can be had for about $100. Academic journals are switching to digital only formats, with no loss in perceived value to the communities that utilize them. Consider the information that has been lost over the centuries because it was not considered worthy of being saved.

Of course, the true value of information is never known until it is needed but no longer available. Basically, we are in a position where saving everything is a far more manageable behavior than ever before. In the past it was often left to archivists and scholars to decide what gets preserved, but now we can outsource curation decisions to the public. Today, we should save as much as possible, so that it is available should researchers of the future deem it worth studying.

Twitter

Just what is Twitter? In most basic terms, it's a feed of text strings of 140 characters or less. Beyond that, Twitter is whatever you want it to be. Updates on your physical location, whatever cute thing your cat just did, what you had for lunch, or "Deep Thoughts" style random musings. In this sense, "tweets" could be considered quintessentially ephemeral. They may have no value to anyone but the person who wrote them.

In the same way, diaries and journals often have no value to anyone but the writer in the moment. However, they can prove to be invaluable later. Should everyone archive their entire Twitter history, as James Bridle [1] did? Probably not. But should the tools be available for those who want to either archive their own Twitter activities, or those of people they find noteworthy in some way? Absolutely.

Twitter for Libraries

Hundreds of libraries are already using Twitter [2]. The possible uses are limitless, really:

  • announcing special events and activities
  • letting patrons know when new materials have been added to the shelves
  • directing traffic to library blogs or other pages where topics can be covered in more depth
  • pertinent and timely community information (for example, where to find your polling place or get tax forms)
  • information finding games
  • lost and found announcements
  • book suggestions directed at particular patron groups
  • posting images of patrons using library resources

However, like with any new technology, users need to stay on top of usage trends. A rarely-updated Twitter feed is going to be an oft-ignored one. Estimates put Twitter's new user retention rate at 30-40% [3]. However, this figure is highly suspect, since it only considers users visits to the Twitter site itself. As of April 30, 2009, only 60% of tweets come from the website itself. The rest come from applications, IM, and SMS, and are not included in the Nielsen figures cited.