Presentations

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Rebuilding the library community in a post-Twitter world

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I had an amazing experience at the end of last month. I was invited to Dublin to keynote the LIR annual seminar on mine and my wife’s 20th wedding anniversary! We took the tip together, the weather was beautiful, and the conference was great. I learned so much from the other speakers, and everyone who asked questions and shared their own experiences.

It was a hybrid event, with around 100 staff from Irish academic libraries split across in-person and online. The venue was fabulous - the picture in the header of this post is of the view of the Liffey through the window of the room I was speaking in.

I was asked to talk about rebuilding our online communities now that Twitter / X has stopped being an option for so many of us. Although the committee wanted me to touch on this from a library point of view, the main focused they asked for was actually the librarian perspective - where do we, as library staff and info pros, rebuild our networks? It’s a great topic, and here are my slides (slightly amended from the event, to work better without me talking over the top).

Below is not a transcript of my talk by any means, just a few notes on the key themes.

Part 1: The State of X

It gives me no pleasure to be spending so much time hauling Twitter over the coals, because the site has been a hugely positive influence on my my life. I joined after the New Professionals Conference way back in 2012 and suddenly I became plugged in to this network of progressive, interesting library people - I absolutely relished being able to be part of that wider conversation. It gave me incredible opportunities (the original catalyst for my keynote at the LIANZA Conference in New Zealand was a tweet from the LIANZA account about how bad the fonts were on the Library Marketing Toolkit website!), helped me get jobs, introduced me to friends, and allowed me launch a freelance career.

More importantly than any of that though, Twitter was the place that enabled me to view the world through other people’s eyes. As a cis-het white male (and you can now add middle-aged to that list) it’s vital to get an insight into how other people experience life and the world and libraries and more, or you end up in a boring, uninformed bubble with potentially damaging knock-on effects for those around you. They say you get more and more right-wing as you get older, but I’ve found the exact opposite to be true (and I was pretty left-wing to begin with): my brilliant Twitter network was vital in that.

Twitter was great because we made it great, and now it’s terrible because some terrible people have come along and set up shop there. So I get the ‘why should we have to leave?’ argument. Individuals can make up their own minds but I think from an institutional point of view, being there is a real risk, reputationally. As it says in slide 9, hate speech is up, disinformation is up, transphobia is up, misogyny is up, bots are up - and actual active (human) users are down. Even beyond the ethical arguments against X, it has ceased to function effectively as a communication tool for libraries - the algorithm rewards conflict and suppresses links, and even when you do ‘good’ tweets (like the ones in slide 8) they don’t get any reach. It’s time to go. Which leads us to the question which titles the next part.

Part 2: Where next for academic libraries?

In academic libraries we have various audiences we’re trying to reach, including not limited to undergraduate students, postgrads, researchers and academics, professional services staff, members of the public, the rest of the Higher Education industry. Of those, I firmly believe Instagram has the student side really well covered, especially if you throw in TikTok too. It’s the public and the University staff we find harder to reach now X is no longer viable.

The public remains a really tricky issue, but I believe Bluesky is really beginning to fill the Twitter-vacuum for academics and researchers. It has a relatively low number of total users (around 35 million at the time of writing; updating count here) compared with the giant social networks, but despite that it is has now overtaken X as the place where most new scholarly research is shared. The academic community is moving over there in large numbers, which is really great news for us in libraries.

My argument in the talk is that having somewhere online to follow our academic community to is great, but leading them there is even better. I’ve really proactively tried to help catalyse a shift to the platform for researchers at my own institution, writing several guides to the platform aimed at University staff and creating a University of York Starter Pack for colleagues to easily connect with each other on the new platform, among other things.

Overall I’d advocate for using Bluesky specifically for researcher-facing messages at the moment (I’m not seeing evidence of large numbers of taught students on the platform) and letting Instagram take care of your student-facing comms. It’s working really well for us, and we now have a larger and more active network for the Uni of York library on Bluesky than we ever did on Twitter, after only a few months.

Part 3: Reconnecting as Information Professionals

No one is obliged to be in an online professional network, of course. There are people who are entirely off social media and benefiting from that choice. If you do want that connection with the wider profession though, with what do we replace Twitter?

The answer depends on what specifically we need from our network. Before we ask where shall we go, we need to ask what we want to DO when we get there. I asked the audience to talk to each other about the various options on slide 31, as well as adding their own…

I’ve been forced to revise my view that LinkedIn is basically awful, because actually it isn’t - the library and HE professionals part of it has been really helpful to me, especially since I left Twitter a year and a half ago. I’ve also noticed that the total views for posts on there is higher than it is on this website - numbers in the slides - so it’s a good way to disseminate and get feedback on ideas. (Here’s my LinkedIn profile if you’re interested.)

Bluesky has for me killed two (Twitter) bird with one stone - it has become a venue to rebuild my library’s academic network, and my own librarian / info pro network. As always, I’d recommend it: if you’ve not given it a go, check out some of the guidance and maybe dip your toe in.

The key thing is, you can choose whatever platform you like as long as you’re part of the conversations you want to be having. It was really so great to be part of this particular conversation in Dublin, so massive thanks again to LIR for inviting me!

If you’re interested there’s a video of the full talk here. It’s a recording from Teams so the audio is slightly in and out and the picture is a bit grainy! But I appreciate the LIR committee making this available, thank you.

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It's okay to say 'um' and 'uh' when you're presenting...

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When we’re presenting we can easily get caught up in worrying about what we shouldn’t be doing. That white noise of ‘I’m doing X too much’ or ‘I’m pretty sure I read that Y is bad’ gets in the way of our ability to relax, find our words and communicate. And in fact a quick Google tells us there are loads of posts from presentation skills / public speaking experts, warning us how important it is not to use ‘fillers’.

Several article headers like 'eliminating the dreaded um' and 'strategies to eliminate filler words and IMPROVE any presentation!'

A small selection of articles on the evils of fillers

Filler words - um, erm, like, sort-of, basically - are all words we use often in conversation, but we worry about using them when presenting at an event, addressing a meeting or doing any other sort of public speaking. The interesting thing (to me!) is that filler words are not all bad, and I disagree with the perceived wisdom here.

I believe that outside of the ‘corporate pitch’ world a lot of public speaking advice seems to centre on, it is actually possible to be TOO slick as a presenter. Rough edges have their merits. We don’t want to sound polished to the point of being corporate or blandly robotic, and fillers can make us sound more human - but the key thing is, some of them are more problematic than others. I divide filler words into two groups: sounds, and meanings.

Sound-based fillers

Sounds (um, ah, er, erm etc) serve two important purposes when we're presenting:

  1. they give us time to gather our thoughts and construct the next part of our sentence into articulate prose

  2. they signal to the listener that the current thought is still in progress and there's more to come

In conversation, these sounds prevent interruptions, and in presentations, they help keep the audience and speaker in sync - this is no small thing. If you find yourself umming and ahing don't worry too much about it! There's value to it, as long as it's not happening several times a sentence.

Meaning-based fillers

Words & phrases such as 'like', 'sort of', and 'basically' are more concerning because they convey specific concepts, which subtly weaken our message.

  • 'like' and 'sort' of make statements sound uncertain

  • overusing 'basically' can make everything seem overly simplified or reductive

  • while 'you know what I mean' can be genuinely useful for encouraging the audience to reflect and look for more nuance in whatever you just said, 'you know' loses any value when overused.

How to reduce filler words

The best way to identify your own filler words is to record yourself public speaking. I use the voice-record feature on my phone to record my conference presentation: I give myself a complete free pass at the time (no self-critiquing during the talk!), and listen back to it on the way home from the event to find ways to improve. You quickly find out which fillers you overuse, and then can work out whether they're relatively harmless 'sounds' words, or potentially undermining 'meaning' words...

There's also some fascinating research on the role body language plays in all this, which deserves a whole future post of its own - I’ve got lost down a bit of a rabbit-hole reading up on this! So for now I'll just address a question I often get asked in Presentation Skills workshops: is it okay if I gesture a lot? And the answer is yes: gesturing is a good thing! If you need to wave your arms about, wave your arms about. It helps you form thoughts and can help the audience interpret your words correctly.

That being said, body-language isn't nearly as important as is often believed. Please be reassured that the idea that '90% of communication is non-verbal' is a complete myth, based on misinterpretations of a 1960s study.

It's your words that really matter.

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A library social media manifesto

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Last night at quarter-past-midnight, I sat in my kitchen and was live-streamed into a #VALA2022 conference room in Melbourne. The hybrid thing worked really well, more on which below, but first things first, here are my slides.

The presentation

A library social media manifesto

When I was invited to present on the topic of social media I wasn’t initially sure how to frame it. I talk about social media in workshops all the time but that’s a different thing, really - 3 hours instead of 30 minutes, hands-on rather than a talk, and normally quite focused so for example just covering one tool or approach. In the end I submitted an abstract I was not quite happy with, and then about a month later was struck by the ‘manifesto’ framing for the info and asked the organisers if I could change my plans! They kindly said yes, updated the website etc, and so the slides above are the product of all that.

I’ve tried to create something universal, so whether you work in public, academic, health, school, law or business libraries this should apply equally. I’ve also tried to create something that will help libraries feel refreshed and re-energised - some people I’ve spoken to have talked about a bit of a lull in their social media progress, after making some real progress a year or so into the pandemic… Anyway, check out the slides and see if the ideas help you. The video of the talk will be available in due course.

I absolutely love, love, love this sketch-note of my talk from Kim Williams. It captures all the key points and works as a companion piece to the slides above. Thank you Kim!

The hybrid experience

I realised on the afternoon of the presentation that my slide theme of slate grey and yellow matched my kitchen… What hadn’t twigged at that point was that I’d be presenting in that same kitchen! (The main ‘home office’ space is in our bedroom, in which my wife was asleep due to it being 12:15am, so the kitchen was really the only opion for this.) The people of #VALA2022 must think I’m REALLY serious about slide design and always match it to the room…

A slate grey and yellow kitchen

He’s not wrong…

ANYWAY the hybrid experience worked really well for me, and gave me hope for the future of conferences. I just attended UXLibs in person and, of all the conferences I’ve ever attended, I think that is the least doable online - we absolutely HAVE to be in the space together to make it work. So it’s a stark choice of, either have it in person or don’t have it at all. But for most conferences, hybrid can work well and VALA2022 is a great example of that.

I was on Zoom, and both my webcam and my slides appeared on the big screen in the room in Melbourne. I could also see and hear the room audience through Zoom, which makes a huge difference to how connected I felt - when I said I was drinking gin while presenting for the first time, and heard people laugh, I settled in right away.

The other key thing to all this was the conference app. People could ask questions the whole time on the app, whether they were watching online or in the room. I had these up on my second screen and responded to them in real time, which I really enjoy. Interactivity all the way through is always my preference over ‘questions at the end’.

Anyway, I had a great time, people said nice things on twitter so I’m assuming it worked well from their end too (much as I would have LOVED to be there - libraries of Australia, please invite me back over to your wonderful country! Running marketing workshops a few years back in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne was on of the best things I’ve ever done professionally). If you’re thinking of running a hybrid conference, talk to the VALA2022 people, they know what they’re doing!

(And if you’re wondering why hybrid is necessary, read Fobazi Ettarh’s post on the subject, and have a look at the Twitter conversation it sparked.)

Thanks to VALA for inviting me, thanks especially to Sam Gibbard, thanks to the organisers for letting me change my talk details and also for recording the session, and thanks SO much to the audience who came along - making your way early to the earliest session of Day 3 no less, and knowing it was a streamed presentation: I appreciate you!

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Book Takeaway and User-Focused Delivery

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Having not presented at a conference for two and a half years, I recently presented at two in a week!

In June I wrote about the Rough Edges and Risks talk I did on library social media for a UK event; a couple of days later I presented on my place of work’s user-centred response to the pandemic, for a US event: NEFLIN’s conference. Because of my incredibly unreliable blogging schedule, it’s taken me two additional months to write about this one…

First off here are the slides.

For this presention I was specifically asked to talk about University of York Library and the things we’ve done since March 2020. The slides above detail our Book Takeaway service, social media response, study space bookings and many other things in a timeline.

I’m incredibly proud of York and our response - the trouble with writing or talking about it is it just sounds like platitudes. ‘Incredibly user focussed’ is such a buzz-wordy phrase but that’s what we were and are. I enjoyed the chance to talk about the way in which we managed to deliver some amazing services during the height of the pandemic, whilst still prioritising staff well-being - it CAN be done.

You can see the presentations from all previous conferences on the Past Talks & Workshops page.

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Risks and Rough Edges: Building Genuine Relationships Through Library Social Media

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Here we are with another regular blog-post, following on from the last one a mere [checks notes] 418 days ago!

I was recently invited by Royal Holloway to present at an event they were organising on academic library social media. RH themselves were also presenting, as were representatives from MMU and Liverpool Uni Libraries. The other presentations were all great (see below) and I learned a lot.

My presentation was about the work we do at University of York Library, and in particular how we’ve seen a monumental spike in social media engagement over the last 18 months or so. The slides are here.

The whole thing was recorded on Zoom so if you’d rather you can see and hear the slides here:

The video above starts from my talk, but I’d really recommend checking out the Nathalie Rees’s talk on MMU, Patrick Walker and our host Greg Leurs’s talk on Royal Holloway, and Amy Lewin’s talk on Liverpool University too.

It was great to hear talks from four different libraries with four varying approaches (I felt we at York had the most in common with Liverpool but everyone came at it slightly differently. There were so many conferences and events centering on social media a few years ago but you don’t get so many now - it’s still a really key issue though!

Thanks again to Greg for inviting me to present.