Acknowledgements

Because social media inherently involves connections to people, it amazes me to think about all the communities and individuals who have contributed to my expertise in this area as well as to the daily developments in the industry. I must thank first the people I talked to on Bulletin Board Systems, Usenet and ICQ that I accessed on campus as an undergraduate and with my noisy dial-up modem at home. I also thank the colleagues I worked with at the Central Texas Library System and the Northeast Texas Library System five or six years ago, who gave me numerous opportunities to train library staff on the powers and challenges of implementing social media in libraries. Currently, my colleagues and administrators at the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at The University of Western Ontario provide the perfect balance of professional autonomy and support so that I can teach social media classes with the pedagogical strategies that I choose as well as perform empirical research into this new age of communication. The American Society for Information Science and Technology, my professional home, has been a source of ideas surrounding social media development for many years now. Robert Foster, a Master of Library and Information Science student in my faculty and a student on two of my past courses, supplied encouraging editorial assistance as well as half of this book’s final chapter. I must also thank the other authors of this book for their high-quality content. Finally, thanks go out to my friends and family for their loving support, although they do not all understand why I check my social media accounts every day, even on holidays!