Twitter can be a fantastic way for librarians to highlight library services and for faculty to draw attention to their scholarship, though both may need encouragement and ideas.
Outreach librarians may feel more comfortable on Facebook or may believe that students are all on Instagram, but Twitter has unique strengths. Compared to other social media platforms, there is as much or more conversation on Twitter, more links to in-depth takes, as well as genuine communities of professionals forming around hashtags such as #lawtwitter. Preservation is also an issue. If library marketing via social media is part of a tenure-track librarian’s job, how are tweets preserved for the tenure file?
Faculty may object that tweeting does not count as publishing, which is correct. But faculty services librarians can help faculty understand how Twitter can be beneficial to their published output, and guide faculty in navigating the platform. And scholarly communications librarians can take on the role of preserving faculty tweets as scholarship in its own right.
We admit there will be challenges. Those challenges can run from the basic (signing up, creating profiles) to the intermediate (policy guidelines, content creation) to the advanced (flame wars, trolling).
In this session two law librarians will discuss their involvement in the entire lifecycle of Twitter use they spearheaded at their institutions. From registration to learning to tweet with a particular voice to preservation, they will identify some of the challenges they encountered and strategies they used to overcome those challenges.
After this session attendees will be able to:
