Librarians as Creators

Librarians are not always creators or creative, but social media, marketing and programs are increasing the necessity for creative, creator librarians.

When viewing the typology of creativity (creators, critics, collectors, joiners, spectators) you can see information professionals easily fit their activities into many of the roles. However, as the creator the librarian has the most power and influence over a project – and is thus more responsible for the success or failure of a creative project. This can be incredibly taxing – particularly with social media which requires the librarian to be actively maintaining their creation. Does expecting librarians to be prolific and innovative creators put an unfair amount of pressure on information professionals who may already be taxed with extra duties due to budget cuts?

 Librarians as Creativity Promoters

You can’t force your patrons into creativity but you can encourage creativity by providing tools and spaces (both in-library and online) for creative collaboration.

Through instruction & information-providing practices (ex. teaching about creative commons, tech how-tos, etc.) information professionals often provide tools for patrons to be social media creators and knowledgable repurposers.

Libraries can also help provide online social tools by providing software and subscriptions to online services. This can be particularly useful for people like artists and musicians who are increasingly using the online world to collaborate. For example, the online notation service Noteflight often has collaborative music-creation projects, but requires a paid subscription for anyone who wishes to create more than 10 scores.

Collaborative creativity between librarians and patrons

Library social media efforts sometimes start with a librarian that encourages others to also create.  For example, LIBRARY BOOKFACE,  initiated by the Carrol County Public Library in Maryland on tumblr encouraged patrons to join and share their own photos of ‘bookfacing’  (people with books over their faces).

Social Librarian Infographic

The use of social media in the workplace can make it easy for organizations to communicate with followers and patrons, but it can also swiftly expose a large number of followers to any accidental mishaps that occur in the social media feed and cause a backlash of criticism (and in some cases result in termination of the employee who creates content for the social media feed).

Increasingly, employees are also required to heavily self-censor their personal social media use or they may end up facing repercussions at work.

Examples of Social Media mishaps (many of which led to termination) within the last few years:

• http://time.com/money/3019899/10-facebook-twitter-mistakes-lost-job-millennials-viral/
• http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/02/being-shamed-on-social-media-should-not-get-people-fired/385597/
• http://www.cnn.com/2013/06/06/living/buzzfeed-social-media-fired/
• http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-fired-2011-5?op=1
• http://www.thestar.com/life/technology/2013/08/15/using_twitter_facebook_led_to_these_people_being_fired.html

Although many of these examples conform to the clickbait style of headline and are designed to elicit emotional responses or cater to views of their reader demographic (ex. Money’s article on ‘social media blunders that cost a millennial a job’) they bring up issues about privacy and increasingly non-existent division of work and home.

Ultimately, these stories highlight the importance of a well-crafted social media policy for libraries that is fully communicated to all librarians and staff at the library (or within the library system). Keeping personal opinions out of organizational social media and maintaining polite and inoffensive language should be obvious. However, policies should also cover things such as when employees are allowed to access the organizations social media (should they address patrons responses/posts at all hours of the day or be restricted to typical 9-5 work hours? –  What should be done about the balance of work and home?) or what to do when employees violate the social media policies.

Aside from shielding the organization and employees from accidents that could cause significant problems, policies can also help make the library’s social media more useful to patrons and more efficient and effective at communicating to the library’s audience by directing content away from memes and jokes that will be ignored by patrons and toward things like hours and programs.

Other Resources

http://blog.credoreference.com/2014/06/5-mistakes-libraries-make-with-social-media/

Liz’s Blog (Feb 9) on Social Media Policy

This past winter I volunteered at the Lyman Museum archive back home in Hilo that is has crowd sourced the older locals in order to identify the people and places in their historic black and white photo collection.

The way the archive/museum went about crowd sourcing in the past was to hold an event and have people write down who they could identify, or to have them call or email the archivist. While this method was great at getting people involved in history and excited about the identification process it resulted in masses of papers, often with messy, illegible writing, that need to be transcribed into the archival database and quite a lot of  extra work for the archivist.

The current archivist is working to create a website/database for the newly digitized photographs so that people can post comments about who and what they identify in the photos. However, the population that the archives is trying to draw information from are people who are mostly over 60. Though the website will be a vast improvement on the process of identifying people and places in the photo collection, as it will be available 24/7 instead once in a blue moon when they hold an event/exhibition,  it may be difficult to engage an older population (of course not all people older 60 are luddites, but the division of digital technology use between generations is apparent).

It leaves me wondering how libraries and archives can improve crowd sourcing from groups that are reluctant to participate or face barriers to participation.

P.S. A great question brought up by Casey Newbegin in the discussion board got me thinking about the process of validating identities and guaranteeing authenticity for archival and museum materials.

When IDing photos there is no guarantee that the person identified is who the idnetifier says. Maybe the identifier has bad eye sight (a distinct possibility for people who are 60+). Who knows? The Lyman Museum has been able to validate identities by receiving the same information several times in some cases with the system of exhibition, email and phone calls. However, if and when the new website with commenting capabilities goes live it can be assumed that this will disappear as people browse comments, notice someone else has already ID’ed the person they recognize and  leave the page. Perhaps by adding a ‘like’ function people who would otherwise lurk and leave will give their opinion on the validity of a comment through a little thumbs up?

Participation is a HUGE part of the online social world. If no one participated social media would not exist – this is most blatantly obvious when it comes to things like reviews and forums.

Personally I find myself often lurking without contributing (which makes me the same as what is thought to be about 90% of people online – http://www.nngroup.com/articles/participation-inequality/). However, when I am given the option to “Like” something I’ve noticed I contribute consistently through expressing my approval (or disapproval) without words.  More infrequently, I can be found as a contributor on topical forums. However, although I may remain a consistent contributor for a few months I often find myself becoming taxed by the constant stimulus and pressure to respond and will disappear like a teenage runaway in the night – cutting ties to everyone and everything on the forum. On certain forums I may reappear again, but this is rare and it may only happen after months of absence.

In my work as an information profession I’ve found that when it’s part of a job or a project I actually really enjoy communicating with others and the intimacy of remaining in close contact. It’s primarily when it comes to my personal use of social media that I become wrapped too tightly in the online social world for my own comfort.

My use of sites for socialization didn’t really start until after Facebook! Although I was convinced by friends to make a MySpace page (so old!) I secretly hated it and only used it a couple times (mostly to look up bands I liked who had free music through MySpace).

When I first started using Facebook I refused to use my real name. Until Facebook using your real name only was a big no-no. Teachers and parents would emphasize the fact that you should never put your true name online with horror stories about teens and preteens who were murdered or abducted after being tracked down online through their name (nowadays we would call this getting doxxed, but back then the term doxxing didn’t exist).

I’ve rapidly expanded my use of social media as new and exciting technological advances and revelations have come about. I now use Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and a few others as well as what most people think of as “the basics” (i.e. Facebook and such) and mostly on my smartphone.

I’m very interested in where social media will take us in the future. For example, Goodreads and Netflix are two sites I frequent regularly that don’t seem social at first glance but rely on social media for reviews of books and movies.