On Monday, 4th February, one of the SUNCAT Project Officers kicked off the Twitter Takeover of the Voices for the Library (@VoicesLibrary) in the run-up to National Libraries Day on Saturday, 9th February. Check out Twitter for #nld13 to see what libraries across the UK are doing.
To give a bit of background:
Voices for the Library (@ukpling) describes itself as “Publicising the Public Library Services in the UK and the work librarians do.” Their sister Twitter account is @VoicesLibrary, which has a “new librarian every day”. As described in an earlier blog post, a call was put out on the LIS-PROFESSION mailing list, asking for librarians from all walks of life who would be willing to talk about where they work, and what makes it so special. Natasha Aburrow-Jones (@TashaAJ), the SUNCAT bibliographic Project Officer, was selected to kick off a week of diverse librarians talking about their roles (others include a museum librarian, a public librarian, an art librarian, an NHS librarian and a University librarian).
Natasha says:
“I applied to be one of the Voices for the Library in the run-up to National Libraries Day as I wanted to tell everyone what a fantastic service SUNCAT is, and how the team behind it are so dedicated to their work. I also wanted to point out that SUNCAT is not merely a librarian’s tool – it’s available for anyone (everyone!) to use.
I was somewhat surprised / most honoured to be selected to be the first Voice; I presumed that my role was so specialised, that it wouldn’t have great appeal to everyone. However, that presumption seems to have been blown out of the water with the comments I’ve received since undertaking the #TwitterTakeover!”
Over the course of the working day, Natasha issued 42 tweets, mainly covering the work that lies behind SUNCAT, to show what happens during the average SUNCAT day. This included talking about the range of libraries that contribute data to SUNCAT, the continual updating of the database, the “Weird and Wonderful” titles found in SUNCAT (and are blogged about thematically), data munging, ease of searching SUNCAT and what a timesaver it is, etc. She also mentioned the new interface that SUNCAT will be having in the near future.
A Storify made up of the tweets has been put together, and can be found here:
http://storify.com/edinadatacentre/suncat-serials-union-catalogue-for-the-uk
You can look at the tweets as they happened, and the responses.
There was much re-tweeting, spreading as far as Sweden, the United States and Australia. It also meant new followers for both @TashaAJ and @suncatteam. Comments included:
(On the new SUNCAT interface) “Wow, that looks very different. I rely on SUNCAT to identify libraries to source articles for ILL requests.”
“Are you doing a “Weird & wonderful” libraries SUNCAT post for National Libraries Day?” – we are now! The post will be put up on Friday, in time for National Libraries Day on the 9th February.
“I’ve never used SUNCAT so I learnt a lot!”