Social media and academia

Dr James Baker, Curator, Digital Research, British Library
 University of Kent LibChat, 28 Jan 2014

Digital curation and research needs to be about more than just resource discovery

Can use Twitter in different ways- there are no rules:
to project information
harvest/gather information
link

You might use Twitter differently for different aspects of your life

To get the most out of Twitter you really need to engage and interact; something many organisations do not do.  Certainly the research unit I work for is keen to project but very cautious about interacting. Any thoughts?

Try Buffer http://bufferapp.com/ to queue up Tweets so that they are sent out at intervals throughout the day rather than all at once

I liked this phrase used in the discussion afterwards
"People aren't using Twitter to read articles, but to find out what people think about them"

As a result of the UK Web Archive  (Since April 2013 the British Library has begun to archive the whole of the UK web domain, under the terms of the Non-Print Legal Deposit Regulations 2013) the BL will soon hold more data than books

Fascinating use of Tumblr - the BL's Mechanical Curator "randomly selected small illustrations and ornamentations, posted on the hour"

The BL has uploaded over one million images to Flickr from 65,000 books from the 17th to the 19th century.  The images are illustrations, diagrams, maps, borders and illuminated letters. Each image is tagged with the metadata for the book from which it was taken. 

As James explained, initiatives such as these pose the question "What is a collection?" Is data derived from other collections in itself a collection?

Reference: Steven Jones (2013) Emergence of the Digital Humanities