LIANZA’s Otago Southland Regional committee has just held a really successful Weekend School in Oamaru, yes, on Valentines Day. We employed our #heartoflibs hashtag partly to reflect the date, must mostly to describe how librarians feel about the libraries we work in, and to reflect the place of libraries at the heart of our communities.

My role on the subcommittee was communications, and I am delighted to share an archive of tweets from the event, some statistics and network analysis. There was a small but active group tweeting at the event and we attracted a number of followers who were not physically present. Over 900 tweets were collected and the #heartoflibs hashtag trended in NZ.

Source: Trendsinnewzealand.

Archiving the event

The Twitter archive, created using TAGs 6.0, has been deposited in figshare with a CC BY license, it can be cited as:

Gallagher, Sarah (2016): Facebook and Twitter use by Public Libraries and University Libraries in New Zealand. figshare. https://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.2182738.v1 Retrieved: 05 58, Feb 16, 2016 (GMT)

A Storify of the tweets is being arranged which is a more visually pleasing means of displaying and reading the tweets and seeing images and video than looking at a spreadsheet! Lee Mclean, for example, has curated a storify of her own tweets and retweets which make excellent reading.

You can also view all the #heartoflibs images here.

Statistics

Here are a few stats obtained through a couple of different analytics services, Keyhole and TAGS 6.0 , to provide you with a sense of the activity and it’s impact over the weekend.

View the whole Keyhole report

TAGS 6.0

Here are some screenshots of analytics created in TAGS 6.0 - note the time is GMT.

The Network

While the statistics give us an idea of the big numbers and who did what it’s difficult to get an idea of how the people participating related to each other, if at all.

TAGS 6.0 provides an interactive network map, as does another tool Socioviz, it’s interesting to compare the two. 

Do keep in mind that TAGS is providing network information back to October 2015, and Socioviz only show a maximum of 100 tweets from 13-14 February - so while it’s not comprehensive (only 10% of the actual tweets collected in TAGS) but it does give you an idea of connections between individuals, so from this we can glean professional relationships and wider networks.

My quest for more knowledge on information needs and design stems from reviewing the Library and Information Association of New Zealand’s website (Lianza.org). This association has broken down different aspects of the library profession into “bodies of knowledge” or “BoKs” for short (Lianza.org). The BoK I am focusing on right now is number three. BoK 3 covers “assessment of information needs and design of responsive services” (Lianza.org). To better understand this part of the library profession, I am going to review articles and other sources that give ideas on how to help improve the user experience in libraries. I will also look for sources discussing design of services to better help serve patrons. 

Here is the link to Lianza.org. It explains the bodies of knowledge in a very organized chart.

It is done. It has taken a few days to wrangle, but after experimenting with mhawksey's TAGS v5.01 a short time ago, and then updating to TAGS v6, I've compiled and published my first set of twitter data. The data set is from the LIANZA 2014 conference and has been published CC-BY on figshare.

Note: this graphic includes all tweets collected, including those identified as having been deleted from the dataset on Figshare

I must acknowledge @ernestopriego from City University London for modelling this great practice in his data sets and for such a thorough description which I found extremely helpful in developing my own.[1]

As Ernesto notes in his own description, this kind of archiving may not be 100% accurate, however, compared with the only other method I have used previously, Storify, TAGS is much more reliable in terms of collating information and visualizing the data.

I do hope this is helpful, particularly to those who (like myself) were unable to attend the conference, those who are interested in libraries and information services, and the great things that are happening in NZ libraries.

If you do refer this data set, I'd be really interested to hear how it has been of use to you. You can find the #LIANZA14 data set on figshare: 

Gallagher, Sarah (2014): Twitter archive from LIANZA Conference 2014 Pou Whakairo #lianza14. figshare. http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1209294

@SarahLibrarina @LIANZAPresident @NPDIreland Fabulous. Thank you. I plan to hack this for my own nefarious ends. Or LibraryLife.#evillaugh

— Luqman Hayes (@theluqmanarian)

October 19, 2014

@SarahLibrarina Magical, thank you Sarah.

— lycanthrope kris (@librarykris)

October 19, 2014

@SarahLibrarina @theluqmanarian @NPDIreland Awesome!!!

— LIANZA President (@LIANZAPresident)

October 19, 2014

On Wednesday 24 October I'll be part of a panel presenting and discussing this topic. My talk will be looking at the community of named student flats in Dunedin.

If you'd like a taster, here's a selection of images I'll be showing as part of the presentation which is entitled: a unique community in the north end of Dunedin: 80 years in 10 minutes.