Technology Sandbox

I love technology and social networking, but if you are going to do it at all you have to do it well. An abandoned social networking profile is a sad thing to stumble across, it shows that someone tried for a little while, and then, for whatever reason, gave up. I think one common reason that people give up is that they feel that they don't have enough followers, likes, retweets, mentions, page views, or whatever other way influence is measured. At some point you have to just keep going, when someone does find your blog you want them to get lost in 10, 20, or 50 posts that have them interested enough that they don't realize that they just wasted an hour scrolling through your photos or text posts.

My favorite social networks are Twitter and Tumblr. I like having the ability to follow the people and topics that are most interesting to me and having them all show up in one place (or in this case, two places). I use these websites almost every day, sometimes from my desktop computer, but more often from the apps on my iPhone. There are a few other sites that have a similar type of feed or dashboard that brings together information from people you follow, Facebook does to some extent, and I believe that Instagram and Vine do as well.

I think the most important thing for information agencies to do is to figure out where their patrons are spending time online. It is also important to try to understand the etiquette of each social network. That may seem like a silly word to be using because most social networking interactions are so informal, but it is worth thinking about. This isn't something to stress about, but I suggest spending some time clicking around and reading through posts on different sites to get a feel for the language, humor, and hashtags that are used.

There may be an overwhelming number of social networks that library patrons are using, but that's okay. The best thing about this technology is that it allows you to cross post things. Maybe someone in the library is really comfortable with Tumblr, well every time the library's Tumblr is updated a notification can automatically be posted on Twitter. There are more connections like this than you would expect, poke around in the settings of each site and see what you find. This allows you to reach more people on more networks with little to no more effort.

An important thing to remember when sharing things is that most of these sites encourage users to repost other people's posts. Take advantage of this, it will make you so much more interesting! Maybe Buzzfeed posted a list of their favorite books of the year and you happen to have several in the library. Share it! Maybe the Nightly News had a great report about the library is Ferguson. Share it! Maybe something inspirational happened in your town, but it has nothing to do with the library. Go ahead, share it! Don't take blogging too seriously, if you find something fascinating/funny/informative, chances are someone else will like it too. I wouldn't advise posting 100 things every day, but it you think something would be interesting to your followers, you should share it.


With complete freedom I would use several social networking sites to digitize the collection I was working with and share it with as many people as possible. I would primarily save images on Flickr because of the large amount of space they offer and the system for organizing visual information. From there I would post at least one thing every day on a Tumblr blog, Today's Document from the National Archives has a great format to emulate. I would also share these posts through Twitter and use Twitter to interact with individuals and institutions. I might use Facebook to make people aware of events and share photos after the events. Finally, I might try Pinterest to curate specific sets of content, but only if I had enough time.