Social Media at the Bangor Public Library
I decided to do a little investigation
into the Bangor Public Library. The BPL is a sizable public library
that serves Bangor, Maine and the surrounding towns, and has been
around in one form or another since 1830. I'm going to take a look
at BPL's use of social media, and see just how they're doing in this
department.
I'm going to start by looking at BPL's
use of twitter. BPL has been using twitter since at least 2009, and
the tweets have definitely changed over time. The first tweets were
clearly of more of a personal nature, and represent the perspective
of one person. There is mention of official library business, and also quite a few items specific to what the tweeter is doing at work. While
this is sort of fun to read, it seems to lack a unified message.
It's interesting watching the way
tweets are done evolve over time. Eventually the tweets seem to move
away from being in the first person and speak of the library more as
"we". For a time they more to the polar opposite and seem
to be largely extremely dry references to reviews and articles:
Eventually, the tone of the tweets
changes again, and finally in the more present time it seems to
change to something which strikes a good balance; not too dry, but
not focused on one person too much of the time. There is also a nice
trend of significantly more interaction with fellow tweeters:
BPL like many libraries uses twitter to
send out announcements for events, and to engage it's readers
regarding issues with the library and other library-related items.
As I mentioned before, the evolution of its tweets, and observing how
they became more on point and less random is important, as it shows
not only a more coherent policy, but also something that is more
reliable as a source of information..
Bangor Public library also maintains an
active Facebook account which much like its twitter is used for
informing the public of events at the library and general community
outreach. Facebook of course offers the opportunity for more
integrated media rich content than a twitter feed.
One creative way reference staff at BPL
used to reach out to patrons was to hold what was called "question
time" where a particular thread. would be closely monitored and
opened up for the public to ask reference questions that would be
publicly answered on that same thread:
I think this is an excellent idea. Not
only good for public relations, but also for answering questions
remotely. Of course this wouldn't be the forum for more discreet
questions, in this case the public nature of it is part of the fun.
There are various kinds of coding and plug-ins that could be used to
do this live on the library's web site, but I still like this because
it preserves the transcript and also puts it out into the public
sphere, and I think it's a great way to show just how resourceful
reference staff can be. Sadly question time seems to have been
discontinued after the staff member who was the driving force behind
it left.
One other item that seemed a little odd to me
was the blog page:
That's right, BPL has no less than 6
blogs. I guess I wonder why so many, and why some entries couldn't
be condensed into a single blog here. Some blogs are more regularly
updated than others, but unfortunately the only one that seems like
more of a general blog for the whole library has not had an entry
since January of 2012. It follows a not atypical pattern; lots of
posts when it started, and then dropping down to almost none. It's
laudable that the other 5 all have at least one post in the last few
months, but why not condense some of them?
I failed to see any indication of a social media policy on the website, so if one exists I would guess it is for internal use only. I would encourage BPL to take a look at all their blogs as I mentioned before. Perhaps there might even be a way of seeing how often each one is getting viewed as justification for condensing some of them together. If I were to suggest other services, the
first couple that might come to mind might be image driven ones
like Flickr or Pinterest. One good use of this might be more images
of the renovations the library is currently undergoing, or maybe to
show off some of the library's interesting collection items. As far as social media as a whole, I think BPL handles what they use well, but a little more can never hurt!
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bangor Public Library on Twitter:
Bangor Public Library on Facebook:
Bangor Public Library Blogs:
Bangor Public Library Home Page:
No comments:
Post a Comment