Of shoes, and ships and sealing wax – curating @PeopleofNZ

Image by Alex Wong via Unsplash

I just spent a week curating the @PeopleofNZ Twitter account; it was awesome! [For those of you not familiar with it, it’s a rocur (rotation curation) account with a different Kiwi at the helm every week – you can sign up or find out more about it here. @Djpaterson is the very helpful admin.]

I had just a couple  three goals for this week:

1). Be an interesting and engaging curator; engage in conversations and reply to everyone (or at least like their tweet to let them know I saw it)

2). Be a bit of an advocate for libraries & libraries – or show the world what a real librarian is like 🙂 A little bit like that “living books” concept where you can go and ‘borrow’ someone for 10-15 minutes and have a chat with them

3). Not stuff it up/send out something hugely embarrassing or offensive to over 5K followers…

Hopefully I did all right on all three accounts – I didn’t get any bad feedback from people and several followers even un-muted the @PeopleofNZ account this week (so that’s good, right?).

I started the week off with a roar on Monday by introducing myself (as a librarian – technically even though my role is “Information Specialist”), and then opening the floor to ANY questions anyone had about libraries or librarians.

I got a range of [mostly expected] questions, including the best place(s) to buy pencil skirts and cardigans, the obligatory Dewey Decimal system questions, some about the stereotype and whether people perceive me as ‘boring’ when I introduce myself at parties, but also some really interesting ones about the future of the library in the digital age, ebooks versus physical [I love both :D], and beautiful libraries – there were some neat pictures shared.

Then I had to have a poll – my husband had corrected me quite recently on a phrase that I had been saying wrong for my entire life, and I just wanted to check if other people shared my mistake.

Ok – poll time [to settle an argument with the husband]. Which is the correct expression to use?

— @PeopleofNZ (@PeopleofNZ) July 18, 2016

It turns out Twitter agreed with him – had some long (and amusing) conversations with people about why “streaks ahead” was NOT the right phrase 😛 [I still blame the Kiwi accent…]

So polls seemed to be a fun way to go, so on Wednesday I quizzed people what they thought about Pokemon Go – I’d been away in Vanuatu for two weeks, completely off the grid with no Internet, and arrived back in New Zealand to a world playing Pokemon…

So Twitter – I'm curious – what do you think of #PokemonGO? #tech #fitness #WearableTech

— @PeopleofNZ (@PeopleofNZ) July 19, 2016

Turns out most people either loved it, or didn’t have the energy to hate it. Heard some cool stories about it getting kids outside and connecting with others – so probably being launched in the school holidays was a good idea 🙂 I even downloaded it, and have started playing it – finding it is helping keep my step count up a bit more during the day 😛 Also had some interesting conversations about data consumption, data collection (and what they do with the location data…)

Thursday was the day to give a bit of a plug for Creative Commons – most people got it right (or maybe I just suck at coming up with legitimate wrong multi-choice options) and had some more interesting conversations around that – one Tweeter had even met Lawrence Lessig – yay!

New poll for Thursday – what is Creative Commons? #cc #creativecommons

— @PeopleofNZ (@PeopleofNZ) July 20, 2016

There were also some other random conversations throughout the week, including snippets about the New Zealand International Film Festival, what we were cooking for dinner – I even got the recipe for a delicious-sounding butter lemon pasta!, and the wonderfulness of adult colouring books 🙂

And finally – here is my week in numbers (pulled together off a couple of Twitter analytic websites):

So all in all, I really enjoyed my week – thanks again to @djpaterson for giving me a chance at the account. And thank you to everyone who tweeted, voted in the polls, and talked with me – it was a great experience, and one I wouldn’t mind doing again 🙂

Just one more thing… #Columbo #BlogJune

I’m sure if you follow me on Twitter you may have noticed a recent spike in tweets on a particular topic – Columbo. Columbo (if you didn’t know) is a TV series from the 1970s starring Peter Falk as the titular character, a police inspector dressed in a brown trench coat. Each episode stars a famous actor in the role of the murderer and follows through the murder and the aftermath where Columbo pieces all the bits together and traps the murderer, either through his words or actions.

I was introduced to Columbo by a good friend at work – thanks @technogogical 🙂 He particularly admired Columbo’s questioning technique and his ability to make the murderer let his guard down because he underestimated Columbo’s intelligence. Columbo acts very unassuming and incompetent, but this is a facade that hides his keen intellect. I was intrigued enough to order the first season. Now I’m two episodes in and also hooked on Columbo.

The funny thing is that when you express interest in a particular topic, you discover there is a whole community who are passionate about the same topic!

Did you know there is a synchronized Columbo watching Twitter group? I didn’t, but now I do! Follow the hashtag #ColumboTV if you are interested.

So if you haven’t yet seen Columbo, I hope this post encourages you to check him out! Watch the video clip for a small taster 🙂