Head Tale

Regina Public Library has officially launched their official Twitter account at @OfficialRPL.

It’s good to see as it’s been a long time coming. In fact, I’ve advocated for us to get on Twitter many times in my four years at RPL and I know others who were pushing for the addition of that service long before I got there.

At one point, we thought we had the go ahead to create an official RPL Twitter account. Maybe a year and a half ago, I was on a committee working to create an online patron satisfaction survey. Our committee suggested to our Administration contact that it would make sense to launch this online survey at the same time that we launched a new RPL Twitter account – killing two birds with one stone as it were. Unfortunately, after initial support for the idea, we were told that a Twitter account needed more planning before implementation – creation of social media guidelines and so on (prompting one person who heard about our experience to joke “It’s 140 characters. How many guidelines do you need?” )

(Also on the question of how many social media guidelines you need,, I’d add my own reply which is “not many!” For example, Ryan Meili’s “Meme Team” has exactly three guidelines for ALL of its social media activity – 1. Keep it Positive 2. Focus on Ryan and What He’s Doing and 3. Don’t Engage Trolls. Heck, that’s less than 140 characters and could be a tweet on its own! Another colleague was even more succinct – “You need one guideline – ‘Don’t be a dick!'”)

RPL also had a brief experiment with Twitter last summer @rplib which lasted 5 tweets and gained 17 followers before coming to a halt.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t the emergence of any kind of social media guidelines or ending of a trial account that finally prompted the launch of the Official RPL Twitter account.

Instead, the library’s hand appears to have been forced after an unofficial account sprang up @RegPubLibrary which seemed, for all intents and purposes, to be an official RPL Twitter account (I know it fooled me when it first showed up in my saved Twitter search for “Regina Public Library”.) The timing made sense too as the library had recently hired a new Social Media Coordinator.

But after asking our Virtual Services and our Marketing departments (which is where the Social Media Coordinator works out of), it became clear that this was an unauthorized account. The OfficialRPL account was launched last week with little fanfare (apparently not even being linked to from the main RPL web site) and the unauthorized account was shut down, likely after RPL sent a take-down notice to Twitter – although the unofficial account appears to have sprung up again, now clearly identifying itself as a parody account.

To be honest, RPL hasn’t had much luck with social media lately.

The union had a blog during its recent contract negotiations which served as an effective advocacy tool but which was closed down after an agreement was reached. But when that site was shut down, a different site called RPLWatch sprang up but without any official sanction (or screening of submitted comments as was the case in the union’s blog.)

This has allowed people to continue to comment on some of the ongoing issues at the library – although in a much more, ahem, forceful manner. (As someone described the RPLWatch blog, it’s a bit like an accident scene where you can’t look away but you also can’t un-see once you’ve seen it.)

That site has an affiliated @RPLWatch Twitter account (which is how I first discovered it) and looking through that accounts list of followers/following, leads to a handful of other parody accounts, ranging in tone from joking (a parody account done in the voice of the library’s mascot, @LyinRPL) to mean (a parody account of our Deputy Director whose name is Julie called @hoo_leee) to those of outside advocates (@reginapublic).

I’ve often repeated the line that the Internet sees censorship as a blockage and routes around it. I think that’s kind of what’s happening here – after the union’s Check-Us-Out blog got shut down at the end of negotiations, a bunch of other outlets sprang up, hydra-like. In addition to the ones I listed above, I know of one other Twitter account about the inner workings of RPL which pre-dated all the others but which has since been shut down. And there are probably others I haven’t come across.

There are some pretty serious charges in these accounts and although I’m no longer the Organization Development Specialist at RPL, I think if I were, the first thing I’d do is recommend some activities to try to assess *how* the internal culture at RPL got so toxic that accounts of this type spring up in the first place. (I did some quick searches but couldn’t find any similar-type sites or Twitters dedicated to criticizing the administration and inner workings of public libraries in various other Canadian cities.)

At the same time, I have to admit that when I was ODS, it was clear that our organizational culture had some issues and I put forward a few different proposals for ways to confirm and address these issues. But like the pushes for Twitter that never got approved over the years, those never moved forward either.

I can’t help but wonder how the situation may be different today if we’d been more pro-active in looking at ways to assess and then improve our organizational culture, just as the story around Twitter may have been different if RPL had moved faster to get on board with that technology.