Library Talk

Portrait of Margaret Boyd. Photo via Ohio University Libraries Digital Initiatives.

I hope you’ll forgive me for making my first post in months a bit of self-congratulation, but I’m just so excited about this project that I had to share.

This winter and spring, a student working in my library’s Digital Initiatives (DI) program is tweeting the daily diary of Margaret Boyd (@MaggieBoyd1873), the first alumna of Ohio University, who graduated in 1873. The diary was scanned and transcribed several years ago for the Ohio Memory project, so this was a great chance to take work that we had already done and use social media to share with a new audience.

While the diary itself is great, Janet Carleton, head of DI and her students realized that there is more to the story than Boyd’s diary entries, which tend to be short. So the student working in DI and a student I’m working with this year to develop social media content are researching topics from the diary and writing posts for our news blog to provide some context. The first two posts by students are about the similarities between Boyd and students today – she was nostalgic about her time at college but ready to graduate – and the classes she would have taken in 1873. I think this is my favorite quote from the diary – so far:

I can not help feeling sad to think this is my last year at college. Many a pleasant hour have I spent within its walls. Still I will be so glad to be able to make something. I have always had to be so careful of every cent.

From January 7, 1873. Who among us who’s been to college hasn’t experienced this feeling?

While the project is new, I think we’ve learned a few lessons already, but the biggest is about collaboration within the library. I’m fortunate to have a great working relationship with Janet, but collaboration for the students, who only work ten hours a week and have other work to do beyond the Boyd project, has been a challenge.

We’ve been using Google Docs to share posts and a web app called 5pm to keep track of materials, ideas and deadlines. I think that this will get easier as we go along, and I hope that the students are learning a skill that will serve them in their future careers.

We also have colleagues in the administration office who have helped us to get the word out on campus and beyond. A story about the project is on the front page of our university’s communications page today thanks to their work. Without a strong collaborative relationship with colleagues throughout the library, I don’t think the project would have received the level of attention that it has already. I’m looking forward to seeing where it goes from here!

I never actually remember to participate in these things until they are over. I was out yesterday afternoon and will be on vacation Thursday and Friday (hello, NYC!) so I’m #libday7-ing it today and tomorrow. Or at least today for sure since I actually remembered to keep track. So, here goes. Project background here.

The latest issue of College & Research Libraries News has an article by Remi Castonguay of Yale’s Gilmore Music Library about promoting your library with Facebook and Twitter. The article is called “Say it Loud: Spreading the Word with Facebook and Twitter.”  Castonguay recommends using Selective Tweets and Twitter Feed to add content to your library’s Facebook and Twitter feed. He also briefly addresses audience building in social media:

Audience building is altogether a different topic, and I won’t fully address it here. Briefly, however, I noticed that while using Twitter, the more you post the more people find you and follow you. The system I described above ensures that your account will be regularly active and that people will notice you. This is akin to talking louder and more often than other people in a meeting; more people listen to you.

I agree with Castonguay that we should embrace tools that make it easier to add content to our social media profiles, because he is right that you do need to consistently add content in order to gain followers. If you don’t talk at all, no one will hear your great ideas. But if you only use Twitter to share your RSS feed from the library blog or from the catalog, it’s akin to being in the meeting and just talking about yourself or what you want to do, without paying attention to what anyone else is saying.

You gain an audience in social media when other people talk about you, either by sharing your content or engaging directly with you. While it’s great to share items from your library blog, just posting the title of a post or a new book and link will probably not lead to a lot of sharing. You will do better to provide some context and let your audience know why they should care. Too much posting about yourself (and your stuff), especially if it looks automatic, will look like spam after a while.

In my experience working on the @AldenLibrary Twitter feed and Facebook page, I have found that our most successful messages have been those that really resonate with the campus audience. For example, I often share photos from the university archives on Facebook (example here) and then place the link to the photo on Twitter with a mention of the university Twitter account, @ohiou, who often RTs our tweet to their much larger audience. The item that received the most impressions on Facebook over the last month was a page from the 1966 alumni journal describing a speech by President Alden (the library’s namesake) at commencement, which I posted the day before graduation in June. While it took time to find the alumni journal page and post it on the Facebook page, experience tells me that this is the kind of thing people like to see from us. It helps build our audience so that we can also share posts about items on the new books shelf or announce events to even more people.

I looked at the Yale Music Library’s Facebook page and Twitter account. It looks like they are not just pushing automatic RSS feeds, but are also engaging with others and sharing content not just about the library, such as a link to a ProfHacker article about Zotero vs. EndNote. I just didn’t see anything like that in the C&RL article,which was focused only on the automatic update options. If you are new to using social media for your library, I’d recommend checking out these tools, but realizing that to really do social media well, it will take more time than just setting up an RSS feed. Before you can tell a lot of people about your library and its treasures, you’ll need to build an audience, and that means taking time to see what works and not being afraid to talk about other people besides yourself. Eventually you’ll have a bigger audience to tell about that great new database.

I’ll be leaving for New Orleans tomorrow to attend my second ALA annual convention. My first was Chicago in 2009. I admit to being a bit overwhelmed by the whole event. This time, however, I have some events I need to attend for committee work or other obligations. So I should be more busy and spend less time deciding what to attend. Plus, the scheduler this year is a million times better, meaning I wont have to lug around the program book with me.

I worked on the RUSA/MARS pre-conference planning committee this year and helped to organize “Strange Bedfellows: IT and Reference Collaboration to Enhance User Experiences.” The speakers will discuss their experiences working cross departmentally in their libraries to improve user experiences and I’m excited to hear what they have to say along with helping to run the event.

I also joined the RUSA Marketing committee this year, which is putting on the President’s Program “Marketing Reference on a Dime.” There will be several speakers to talk about their low-cost methods for marketing reference services. The speakers come from a variety of libraries and should have some great ideas for attendees to take home.

On Sunday, I’ll be attending the LLAMA PR Xchange because my library won an award in the video category for “Circulation Desk: Story #26,” a video about the services of the circ desk in a parody of Jay-Z’s “Empire State of Mind.” It sounds ridiculous, I know, but is really awesome. I didn’t work on making this video, but the creator is not attending ALA so I’m going to be on hand to either pick up the certificate or grab a photo of someone else from the library picking it up. I’m also looking forward to checking out the Xchange and seeing what other materials libraries are using for PR.

I have some potential programs picked out for the rest of the weekend, including several time slots with up to four potential options. I think some of those might come down to which one is closest and requires the least time out in the sweltering New Orleans heat, the one thing I’m really not looking forward to.

My library has a new mobile app and this week it was finally approved for inclusion in the Apple App Store, making it available for all smartphones. My colleagues and I have been working on developing promotional materials for the app, which included the video you can see below.

Making the video wasn’t technically very difficult, since iMovie makes it pretty easy to add text and other effects, like the panning over the photos. But it was difficult nonetheless. We decided to keep the video short and only focus on one feature; that the app is available for all data-enabled mobile devices.

I finished a draft of the video on Tuesday and showed to my colleague who developed the the app with Boopsie. While we both liked the look of the video, I was uneasy. The video doesn’t actually say anything about the content or tools in the app and it just didn’t seem finished. I wondered whether we might need to better explain the message of the video and why we were showing all these librarians with their phones.

Thankfully, reason prevailed, and we left out any additional text (though the “your” in the second bit of text did get an outline for emphasis) and did not even try to describe the app. We can always make another video later or write blog posts describing the neat features of the app. This may even be more effective marketing, as it gives us multiple opportunities to talk about the app on our social media accounts.

While this all make sense when I write it out, it still feels counter-intuitive. I want to explain all about the app, just like I’d love to explain to undergrads at the reference desk all the details of using our article databases when they only want an article or two because their teacher said they had to cite them in a paper. Where does this come from? I think it’s an enthusiasm for information seeking that doesn’t seem to be shared among the general population. But I think it may also be a lack of confidence in my own ability to explain without lengthy prose and a wealth of details. Plus, showing is so much harder than just telling. Keeping to the relevant details is a skill I’m still developing.

Anyway, I do love how this video turned out, which is probably my true motive for writing this post. Most of the videos I make are screencasts in an article database or the catalog and this is infinitely for fun, especially since it includes music. Don’t watch the video too much though. That song gets stuck in your head!