#FromTheArchives: An Assessment of a Successful Social Media Program in an Academic Archives

Abstract

Academic archives can seem intimidating to the public at large. Accessing and enjoying their contents is, for some, a foreign experience. Even when archives leverage extensive fiscal and technological resources to make their materials available as well-organized, online digital collections, this perception often persists. In 2013, the Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library (SWC) at Texas Tech University (TTU) began an extensive Web 2.0 outreach program designed to overcome that perception for researchers other than TTU students and faculty. Using social media allowed the SWC to creatively and successfully rethink and reframe connections to the nonresearcher public. This article identifies the origin and breadth of that success by walking through the implementation of a comprehensive social media outreach program and providing a qualitative and quantitative assessment of its success, with an eye toward how the SWC and other archives might reframe the use of social media in the future.