ALA Conference 2009: Twitter Confidential—@ALAsecrets Interview
ALA 2009: This week, LJ caught up with the mastermind behind the @ALAsecrets Twitter account that aired some of the recent conference's dirty laundry and raised a few eyebrows
Josh Hadro -- Library Journal, 7/21/2009
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This week, LJ caught up with the mastermind behind the @ALAsecrets Twitter account that aired some of the recent conference's dirty laundry and raised a few eyebrows. Before it was shut down, the Twitter account served as the most prominent conference back channel of librarians' commentary, criticism, and tales of evening exploits. (See the Not All Bits blog for more background on how the original account was shuttered only to be replaced with ALAsecrets2009; see the tweets sent to the original account on Twitter Search).
The project has already spawned an imitator, just in time for the American Association of Law Libraries conference starting July 25: AALLsecrets.
ALAsecrets has asked to remain anonymous given some of the extreme reactions to content on the account, but still offered LJ readers some insight into the motivations behind the project and how we might use the anonymous criticisms constructively.
Who are you? Were you actually at ALA?
I'm a fairly new second-career librarian in my mid-thirties, recently graduated from an ALA-accredited program. I've been working in the field for over a year, and I've been active in the library community in one the largest cities in the country. The Annual meeting in Chicago was my third ALA conference.
What brought about @ALAsecrets?
There's the assumption that anytime you give people anonymity, they'll act like idiots. I think projects like PostSecret, however, are a perfect example of how anonymity frees people to share some of their well-guarded thoughts and emotions without fear of ostracism or reprimand. PostSecret is a rare slice of raw humanity.
I was hoping @ALAsecrets might tap into that same spirit to reveal a side of librarians that they don't feel safe or comfortable sharing in a professional setting. That includes criticizing people who are supposed to be leaders in the field (but don't act like it), shedding politeness for frankness, and nurturing creativity in a profession that has made a science out of stifling it.
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Why Twitter?
I can't think of another venue where something like this could have caught on so quickly and generated the kind of buzz (and ire) it did in such a short amount of time. I was really bored by the sort of tweets I was reading with the #ala2009 hashtag that day, so it made sense to me to create a back-back-backchannel to the kind of banal "I am here" and "This is great" tweets I was reading elsewhere.
Besides the fact that some librarians talk a big game of sexual hijinks, what are we supposed to take away from the @ALAsecrets Twitter stream?
Librarians are funny, clever, and human. I'm inspired by the level of creativity that went into some of the anonymous tweets, and I was sad to see that creativity squashed so quickly.
Were you surprised when someone shut down the original Twitter account?
Yes and no. I intentionally left the account open with the password public to see how long it would take for someone to shut it down. Some have argued that any bot trolling Twitter could find mention of "password" and shut the experiment down. Given how quickly it was shut down and the limited arena in which it was promoted, I find it hard to believe that @ALAsecrets was shut down by anyone other than one of our own.
Years ago I sat in one of my library school seminars and my classmate tried to convince us that it wasn't censorship if you didn't purchase books that might be controversial for your library. I'm sure that person is now doing a great disservice to the community s/he is serving—and unfortunately they're probably not alone.
What would you say to all those who call the feed "a sewer of depravity"?
It's obvious that there were tweets claiming dubious sexual exploits, but to think that hooking up at conferences doesn't happen seems really naive to me. I really had no idea that sex would have dominated the feed so early in the experiment, but that direction didn't come from out of the blue. Librarians are grown-ass adults with sex lives and senses of humor. Deal with it.
And what would you say to those who claim that these Twitter accounts reflect poorly on the profession?
If people are honestly worried about how @ALAsecrets reflects on the profession, we're in bigger trouble than I thought. We have so much work to do right now to retool and reassert libraries' positions in the communities they serve that to worry about some Twitter experiment seems foolish at best.
I have to ask: are you secretly the Annoyed Librarian?
I am not the Annoyed Librarian.
But what actually sets you apart?
The Annoyed Librarian makes me yawn. I think empowering thousands of librarians to be candid about their work and their colleagues is far more interesting than the rantings of one individual.
Still, it seems pretty clear that you're tapping into a similar well of frustration (and bravado)—is there a constructive way of channeling the Annoyed Librarian in all of us?
We're a polite profession, for the most part. We eagerly serve our communities and smile regardless of how annoying our patrons can be or clueless our bosses are. That said, we could stand to be a little more assertive and encourage candid criticism among our ranks.
What are your favorite couple of tweets from the original @ALAsecrets?
"I'm a librarian. That's why I am reading every single word on every single slide out loud to you. Now go to sleep."
"I am an expert at technology integration and I will prove it just as soon as I figure out how to make my slides advance."
"Watching some vendors use twitter at #ala2009 is as painful as watching my parents try to figure out 'their facebooks'"
What do we have to look forward from @ALAMWsecrets at Midwinter?
That's a good question. ALASecrets came about in just a couple of hours while I was bored in meetings. With six months until Midwinter, I might have time to form a committee, do some focus grouping, and see how much of the spirit I can take out of the project between now and then.
