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Recently, I’ve been reading several articles on the benefits and pitfalls of using social media as a form of community outreach. It seems to be an intuitive notion that social media should help with reaching patrons outside of the library, as it is very popular amongst people of all ages.  However, some literature that I’ve read touched on many issues that needed to be addressed before actually using social media in a professional way. Some of the concerns are highlighted below:

Do I even want to follow a library?

One of the biggest issues that librarians are faced with when it comes to using social media is that they feel as though their work is all for nothing (Chu & Du 2012; Connell 2009). There isn’t much of a response from the patrons, and this may cause motivation to decrease amongst librarians who are using social media. Dickson and Holley (2010) found that social media pages tended to have several new users “liking” their main page, but most users did not retain interest and did not continue to interact with the posts.

Image indicating the first step to following a page on Facebook. Taken from http://www.privateschoolreview.com/articles/201 [Creative Commons licensed].

Stop spamming me…

Another issue that librarians have encountered was that they would try to promote events or services and end up posting too many messages. Connell (2009) found that patrons tended to get frustrated with receiving too many messages or postings on a page that they were following. They would end up defriending or stop following the library’s page.

“Stop Spam” Sign taken from http://pixabay.com/en/road-sign-attention-shield-stop-464655/ [Creative Commons licensed].

Where’s my privacy?

Sometimes, librarians might be seen as part of an academic institution and people do not want their personal information being linked to what they believe to be an authoritative figure. Then, there are instances where librarians try to “friend” students as their way of reaching out to them. This might give off the incorrect impression that librarians are trying to invade students’ privacy (Connell 2009).

Image showing privacy being taken away and erased as taken from http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Facebook-_The_privacy_saga_continues_(4638981545).jpg [Wikimedia licensed].

Questions: What can be done about these issues? What are your thoughts on this topic? Have you ever seen anything implemented in order to help resolve these problems?

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Community Outreach?

Is social media used in order to promote library services and resources? It might seem as though it would be a good place to start with advocating events and available subject guides since social media has taken up the time of several adolescents and adults. Scrolling down the newsfeed, retweeting other people’s tweets.. These are all things that have become more normative and embedded as a part of several people’s lives. But are there a lot of libraries who actually put it to use?

The Main/”Basic” Types:

As I was doing a quick overview of the impact of social media in academic libraries for a potential research paper, I came across some interesting readings. It seems to be that several forms of social media have been used in the past in order to help with engaging users. Libraries have used Facebook, MySpace and Twitter (or at least most of the studies looked at these three types) and also blogs, YouTube videos and Wikis. I found this particularly interesting and was curious as to what they were used for.

An example of the Vancouver Public Library Facebook page.

What is it used for?

Primarily, Facebook and things of the like are used for virtual reference services and promoting events that are going on in the library. It’s a simple way of interacting with patrons by answering questions and responding to any comments that they leave (Dickson & Holley 2010). However, it’s interesting that there are blogs, YouTube videos and Wikis used as well. Its purpose is to give additional detailed information to patrons as they can easily be linked from a Facebook page, for example, to the blog, video or Wiki (Vuvovich, Gordon, Mitchell & Ennis 2013). An example of a blog that I found in relation to UBC was the Digitizer’s Blog hosted by the UBC Library Digitization Center. A YouTube video that I came across was a tutorial created by UBC on research guides.

This is an example of a YouTube video that UBC Library provides.

Questions: It seems like Facebook and Twitter are very popular amongst the most commonly used social media platforms. Have you seen any other social media platforms being used by libraries? How much have patrons interacted with it and has it been successful?

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