ASU LibraryChannels and 4Cs - brief critique

What can be said of Arizona State University (ASU) Libraries' use of Youtube, Facebook and Twitter in terms of collaboration, conversation, community, content creation?

Content Creation

The ‘Library Minute’ videos share information with fast fun. They meet Farkas’ (2012) adjectives: vibrant, engaging, real personality (the librarian is named, smiles constantly and most of her jokes are funny). Importantly, the videos are accurately captioned; and their descriptions are concise but thorough and hyperlink relevantly.

Anali Perry in the "Holy Grail" scene of
ASU LibraryChannel's video of
 "The Library Minute: Academic Articles

Designed to give information to a small audience, it is perhaps no surprise they do not generate conversation or viral viewing.

Conversation

Consistent with recommended practice (eg: Schrier, 2011), ASU Libraries monitor and respond to (at least some*) local Twitter mentions of the library. Help 2-3 hours later (perhaps from the roundabout search/feed) might be a little slow for the print-woed and lost, but might bring students back if they’d given up.

They do jovial, light responses, but miss opportunities to move into conversation. For example:

Rather than "we'll visit", to a scholar's tweet about their work in the collection a librarian could:

• Retrieve, optimise findability, and link to its record (and start a chat about permalinks scholars can use to promote their own work?);
• Tweet a currently relevant synopsis;
• Or pursue conversation--ask whether the writer continued exploring the same field etc?  Maybe segue into digitisation parameters in their repository?

Facebook facilitates faster (3 minutes) response:

Good answer (maps) provided in a friendly tone. But it was a closed response--could encouraging that game idea have led to spontaneous co-creation?

Community

Comparing to enrolment numbers**, Nicole showed that students have not yet flocked to ASU Libraries’ Twitter stream. However Facebook’s public display of likes and “talking about” are for the past seven days (Menousek, 2011) rather than over all time and so do not indicate a page’s community size. If their Youtube videos are embedded in orientation materials, the number of views and subscribers Youtube reports may not reflect the videos’ total audience.

Collaboration

None seen nor appears to have been sought, would the streams be more popular if they did involve students?

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*I did not check for actual mentions. --^--

**Conveniently teaching me how to find enrolment figures for US universities (Thanks Nicole).--^--

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This has been a response to the fourth optional OLJ Task (Module 3): A critical evaluation of ASU Libraries' use of Youtube (viewing five of ASU's collection of The Library Minute videos ) and two other "web 2.0" platforms (used as part of the ASU Library Channel suite at http://lib.asu.edu/librarychannel/) "to achieve the 4Cs of social media" (in no more than 350 words).

For brevity, questions about whether the 4Cs are constructive for library goals had to be left out.

References

Farkas, M. (2012, July 23). Behavior vs. belief and changing culture. Information Wants To Be Free. Retrieved from http://meredith.wolfwater.com/wordpress/2012/07/23/behavior-vs-belief-and-changing-culture/

Menousek, B. (2011, October 20). What does it mean when Facebook says ‘n number of people are talking about this’? Quora. Retrieved from http://www.quora.com/permalink/px9aFgmKR

Schrier, R. (2011). Digital librarianship & social media: The digital library as conversation facilitator. D-Lib Magazine, 17(7/8). Retrieved from http://dlib.org/dlib/july11/schrier/07schrier.html

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Part of my Wordpress→Blogger journey, this post copied 09/01/2021 in republication of my 5 October 2012 post at my experimental self-hosted Wordpress where it achieved 52 views.

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