EduGlu Sandbox

Idling some thoughts about what to talk about in a session the OU Library* is running with some folks from Cambridge University Library services as part of an Arcadia Trust funded project there, I started wondering about how info professionals in an organisation might provide invisible support to their patrons by joining in the conversation…

*err - oops; I mentioned the OU Library without clearing the text first; was I supposed to submit this post for censor approval before publishing it? ;-)

One way to do this is to comment on blog posts, as our own Tim Wales does on OUseful.info pages from time to time (when I don’t reply, Tim, it’s because I can’t add any more… but I’ll be looking out for your comments with an eagle eye from now on… ;-)

Another way is to join the twitterati…

“Ah”, you might say, “I can see how that would work. We set up @OULibrary, then our users subscribe to us and then when they want help they can send us a message, and we can get back to them… Cool… :-)”

Err… no.

The way I’d see it working would be for @OULibrary, for example, to subscribe to the OU twitterati and then help out when they can; “legitimate, peripheral, participatory support” would be one way of thinking about it…

Now of course, it may be that @OULibrary doesn’t want to be part of the whole conversation (at least, not at first…), but just the question asking parts…

In which case, part of the recipe might go something like this: use the advanced search form to find out the pattern for cool uri that lets you search for “question-like” things from a particular user:

(Other queries I’ve found work well are searches for: ?, how OR when OR ? , etc.)

The query gives you something like the above, including a link to an RSS feed for the search:

http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=how+%3F+from%3Apsychemedia

So now what do we do? We set up a script that takes a list of the twitter usernames of OU folks - you know how to find that list, right? I took the easy way ;-)

Liam’s suggestion links to an XML stream of status messages from people who follow PlanetOU, so the set might be leaky and/or tainted, right, and include people who have nothing to do with the OU… but am I bovvered? ;-)

(You can see a list of the followers names here, if you log in:
http://twitter.com/planetou/followers)

Hmmm… a list of status messages from people who may have something to do with the OU… Okay, dump the search thing, how about this…

The XML feed of friends statuses appears to be open (at the moment) so just filter the status messages of friends of PlanetOU and hope that OU folks have declared themselves to PlanetOU? (Which I haven’t… ;-)

Subscribe to this and you’ll have a stream of questions from OU folks who you can choose to help out, if you want…

A couple of alternatives would be to take a list of OU folks twitter names, and either follow them and filter your own friends stream for query terms, or generate search feed URLs for all them (my original thought, above) and roll those feeds into a single stream…

In each case, you have set up where the Library is invisibly asking “can I help you?”

Now you might think that libraries in general don’t work that way, that they’re “go to” services who help “lean forward” users, rather than offering help to “lean back” users who didn’t think to ask the library in the first place (err…..?), but I couldn’t possibly comment…