#uklibchat #ub13

Last in the session I'm attending this morning at the CILIP Umbrella conference #ub13 in Manchester, UK, today was a talk on#uklibchat: instant ideas and collaboration + access to knowledge from Ka-Ming Pang @agentk23, Online Support Librarian, St George’s University of London. The website is at http://uklibchat.wordpress.com/. Ka-Ming talked about what it was and how they ran it. #uklibchat runs regular discussions on library and information topics using tweets.
I am liveblogging and this was the third of three 15-minute talks, which I was working hard to keep up with, so at this stage I missed some of Ka-Ming's points, but there is lots of information on the website ;-)
She was urging people to join in - as it helped to get connected, share views and find out about things. Key to running #uklibchat was team work, exploiting a range of technology, being willing to ask people to do things, being adaptable and always looking for ways to improve things. They worked hard to promote #uklibchat, and when they added feature articles and implemented a daily tweets rota, then hits on the website went up.
Points from discussion afterwards included that: employers should see that it WAS benefiting work life, but whilst some employers were very welcoming of work-time twitter use, others were not (also some employers might have very specific policies about use of social media: and Keri added that they had examples of people losing their jobs because of use of social media). #uklibchat runs in the early evening (for UK people) so people could engage in their own time.This led to the issue of how people can manage their personal and professional use of social media, and Jo Alcock talked about how she has managed to keep very up to date professionally using social media. She saw social media complementing the other tools people use for continuing professional development. Some people in the audience talked about how they had personal and professional identities in social media, which they kept separate.