Introduction

When I talk to people about social media, I am often asked an underhanded question. The question goes something like, “do you have any evidence for the number of people who use social media in libraries?” I have been asked this by researchers at conferences, reviewers of several of my manuscripts, and IT managers at my own campus. They say it with a touch of disdain. What they mean to say is, “no one reads blogs or cares about blogs.” They see Facebook as a place where high-school kids post concert photos. To them, social media are not serious.

Yet, if you read the library literature or attend library conferences, social media have at times been held up as the savior of libraries. Some authors make it sound like blogs were invented for libraries and that libraries were invented to blog. Don’t worry about circulating books or the number of transactions at the reference desk, we have Facebook. Sometimes it sounds as if there is no problem that librarians can’t tweet away.

The reality is somewhere in the middle. Social media can definitely help librarians reach out and make connections. Still, practicing librarians should be concerned at how little traffic our social media sites see. I have interviewed blog authors who sheepishly admit that they long for more interaction from readers. They would even welcome negative comments that were not spam. In a survey for D-Lib Magazine, Michalis Gerolimos (2011) found that college library Facebook pages had a relatively small number of people following the page; furthermore, interaction was almost entirely limited to staff members.

Despite this finding, I am not sure how libraries can afford not to use social media. The world is changing around us, and we are doing our best to keep up. I think that libraries should keep in mind the demise of the video rental business.

Not too long ago, the video store chain Blockbuster dominated the movie rental market. Little towns, suburbs, big cities all had Blockbusters. The company grew and expanded, and it gave its customers what they wanted: a wide selection of movies right in their backyard. In 2010, Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy. Why? Because the Netflix business model of mailing DVDs to viewers and streaming movies over the internet had eroded so much of Blockbuster’s business that it could no longer sustain itself. In the year 2000, a company like Netflix would have been unthinkable. Mailing DVDs would have sounded silly and the infrastructure required to stream video was out of reach. And what about the human touch? Did we want to have a person on hand to help us? If you asked Blockbuster customers, they probably would have told you that browsing in the local store was an important experience. They definitely would not have asked for streaming video, and why would they want to wait three or four days to get a DVD in the mail when they could just walk down the street and pick one up off the shelf? Blockbuster died not because it didn’t do its job well, but because it didn’t recognize that the world was changing around it. Netflix was not better at being Blockbuster. Netflix was a whole new thing (Surowicki, 2010).

That said, I do not think that libraries are the next Blockbuster. Librarians do recognize that the world is changing around them, which is why they have jumped into social media with both feet. The reality is that social media are no longer new. “Blog” was the word of the year in 2004 (BBC News, 2004), so it’s not like we haven’t had enough time to evaluate the technology. Not only have many libraries evaluated social media, but many have escalated its use to all parts of their existence. At the same time, there are still significant numbers of libraries that barely have a basic website up and running.

This book is an argument for making social media fit your library. Although I may dabble in some of the hype around social media, I do not believe social media to be the answer to all of the challenges facing libraries. Some aspects of our work have not changed over the past decade, and some aspects will not change over the next decade. Our users will always have a need for information, a need for community space, a need for open and affordable learning, and, ultimately, a need for us to engage our community for the betterment of all. The model for how we fill these needs may shift, but the needs will remain.

The argument here is that social media in your library must make sense for your library. For some of us, that may mean pulling back. For others, it may mean scaling up. For all of us it is about weighing needs and resources and considering how our staff members work as an organization, because this book is not really about technology at all. It is about people, interaction and engagement

A note about terminology

I generally use the phrase social media to refer to a broad range of specific technologies including blogs, microblogs, social networking sites, social bookmarking sites, video sharing and location-based sites. In some places, I may discuss a specific type of technology (e.g. microblogging) and where appropriate I discuss specific tools (e.g. Twitter). Experts debate whether or not these tools are really related technologies deserving to be classified together. I acknowledge this, although the debate is not carried forward in this text. Many of these technologies are banded together because they are part of a wave of innovation that is different from preceding tools. Only time will tell whether the concept of social media carries meaning into the future. As the concepts in this text can be applied across a range of social tools, the practical implications for the technology do not hinge on whether these tools are classified together.

In the text, I refer to the people who work in libraries. For the sake of practicality, I often refer to these people in general terms. Our profession is quite diverse in how we employ people to accomplish work. Depending on country, type of library, size of community, size of budgets, contractual obligations and goals, we ask people with different levels of training to perform many different (and similar) tasks. I generally use the term librarian to refer to individuals with a master’s degree in library and information science who perform the central functions of the library profession. I use the phrases library staff or organizational members to refer to any employee, including librarians, who work in a library. I leave it to the reader to translate the ideas of this text into their specific library environment.