e-resource librarian job requirement: social omnipresence

the following scenario has happened enough in the past year for me to know that while i’m at work i have open the following social platforms all day: twitter; facebook; friendfeed.

while having coffee this morning i scrolled through my facebook stream, to catch up on who was doing what. i noticed the gale page (http://www.facebook.com/GaleCengage) had posted they were having problems with their site and were working to resolve the issue. a few minutes later, as i moved on to view the library society of the world stream on friendfeed (http://friendfeed.com/lsw), i noticed @awd posted a query to the group, to see if others were having problems searching/retrieving in gale. having just seen the posting on facebook i was able to respond to @awd that they were having problems and were working on it. a few minutes later, as i viewed my twitter stream, i noticed that gale (https://twitter.com/galecengage) reported that their technical issues had been resolved. i posted a quick update to @awd on friendfeed.

if you walk by my desk you may think i’m fooling around (facebook and twitter as tools for work?!), but i’m actually building my community. e-resource librarians are often the only one in their library charged with monitoring the availability of the library’s e-resources, which means that we connect to others like us via social media. that community is pretty tight, i’d say. we help each other out like this all the time. i don’t think i could do my job as well if i didn’t have consistent access to all these social tools, frankly. remember when ebscohost went down a couple months ago and nobody from ebsco told us what was going on? i was able to let our patrons know what was what, thanks to information i found via my social contacts.

if you’re an e-resources librarian, are there other ways you connect with other e-resource librarians? is anybody using instant messaging for this kind of community building? i’ve not really used i.m. before but if you’re out there lurking i’d happily join in.