I used Twitter Search and Google Alerts for this activity trying to find out information about Elkhorn, Metro Community College, EVC, and a lot of other combinations. Setting up the feeds themselves wasn't hard at all but for the most part I came up with a whole lot of nothing. This just shows that Metro and the Elkhorn Campus Library need to have more of a presence on the web. Twitter search was pretty helpful but Google Alerts seemed to be all over the place when it came to results. So I finally narrowed down what I was searching, my job title, Library Assistant.
Twitter Search brought up a lot of interesting comments when searching for Library Assistant. A comment posted on May 15, 2009 by Amy McDonald said, "library assistant. the swearing must stop. let shhhushing commence." Another interesting comment about library systems and the potential pay they receive was said by Adrian Villagomez on May 7, 2009, "was the front runner for a library assistant position, but i passed so i can make some real $$$ as a bartender, who wants a drink?"
The Google alerts were not extremely helpful and they repeated stuff a lot, most of the time it came up with results but not for the right library or college. One thing that I found and replied to was as series of articles by Lisa Philpotts called So What Exactly Do You Do?, she provided information about many different aspects of libraries and library related jobs. These posts can be found at http://bsn2mls.wordpress.com/2009/05/18/so-what-exactly-do-you-do-part-4-academic-health-sciences-library-tech/.
A way in which I would recommend people use these searches is to find different jobs. I was surprised at the large amount of post I found through Twitter Search that were job posting, that just goes to show you that you can find a job or at least the possibility of one almost anywhere. Many of the results I found were job posting, some blogs, random newspaper articles overall a wide collection of information just sometimes on things that I don't need to know about.
These tools would be very valuable in marketing out library seeing as there were not many results at all about this specific library. Using these tools would let the library successfully reach all of it's patrons including the online student. Using tools like Twitter, Flickr, or other social sites like Facebook would most likely improve the patron library relationship. Now we just have to wait for the college's approval to implement these tools. Hopefully this happens sometime soon seeing as the students here are very technology based.
