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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