UPDATE: Shoutout to 8bitlibrary.com‘s own @wawoodworth for being one of the founders of the whole #followalibrarian thing!

For those of us librarians on twitter, the people we follow are playing an important role in our professional and personal development. However, if you are new to twitter or you haven’t followed anyone in awhile, you may feel your tweets have leveled off in quality. I have a solution that isn’t “just give up on tweeting”.

Reinstate #followalibrarian for #followfriday!

Back in the day on twitter, librarians used the #followalibrarian hashtag to supplement the #ff or #followfriday hashtags. This helped librarians find each other. Somewhere along the line, #followalibrarian disappeared. It’s time to bring it back.

We here at 8bitlibrary.com are especially counting on you librarians with 1000+ followers to reinstate #followalibrarian. RT this article so we can breathe a new life in librarianship on twitter.


Even if you don’t have lots of followers, or any followers at all, you can still help. Here’s some ideas for you all!:

  • School Librarians, #ff educational tweeps that librarians may not have have had contact with before.
  • Children’s Librarians, who are your favorite musicians, authors, artists, tv personalities, bloggers, or lap-sitters?
  • Library Directors, turn us on to great library twitter accounts that we can all use as examples for twitter marketing techniques.
  • Academic Librarians, who can you #ff that will help the rest of us influence positive change on our campuses?
  • Gamers, #ff some gaming tweeters who will help librarians build game collections.
  • Non-librarians, who can you #ff that would help expand our librarian minds?
  • Followers of @JustinLibrarian, RT this post, kthnx!
  • All Twitter Librarians, follow the #ff’s from your tweeps. They probably won’t steer you wrong, and expanding who you follow beyond your PLN to related fields will only serve to make you a more well-rounded librarian.
  • Librarians not yet on Twitter, join now and get in on the #followalibrarian renaissance.

    • Here at 8bitlibrary.com, we are about gaming in schools & libraries. But on a bigger scale, this website is about fitting librarianship into the framework of other fields. In this case, the field is gaming. You might be someone who can fit librarianship into a non-library box, and following related fields on twitter will help give you new ideas on how to do that.

Librarians have much to offer other fields, especially info, education, and social media related ones! By expanding who you follow, you are expanding our whole profession’s influence and importance.

Also, don’t forget to follow the whole 8bitlibrary.com crew: @8bitlibrary, @JustinLibrarian, @LibraryGuy, @librarymafia, @RedheadFangirl, @wawoodworth, & @LibrarianJP (ME!). Follow 8bitlibrary.com’s RSS feed and post your @ twitter name in the comment box here so others can follow you, too.