Implementing Twitter in a Health Sciences Library

Abstract

The NYU Health Sciences Libraries created an account on Twitter, a microblogging service, as a new outreach tool marketed to students, faculty, and staff. The team used Twitter to promote resources, events, and news. Twitter is a part of a pipeline of information that also includes the library's Web site and Facebook. Although it is difficult to measure the effectiveness of a social networking tool, the overhead of using Twitter is so low that it merits consideration.

Leveraging the Power of a Twitter Network for Library Promotion

“…Other groups to note were University departments/organizations (9%) and faculty/staff (5%). Cuddy et al (2010) found a similarly diverse set of followers in the early days of the NYU Health Sciences Libraries' Twitter account.…”

“…While Twitter is an effective tool for broadcasting library information, the scholarly community appears to be united in the belief that Twitter should be used by academic libraries to interact with followers in order to take full advantage of the platform (Cole, 2009;Cuddy, Graham, & Morton-Owens, 2010;Del Bosque et al, 2012;Dickson & Holley, 2010;Gunton & Davis, 2012;Milstein, 2009;Sewell, 2013). Gunton and Davis (2012) suggest that limiting a library's social media activities to the distribution of information represents a failure to appreciate the interactive nature of the modern internet.…”

“…Such an analysis is critical to the development of targeted marketing and relevant tweets (Cuddy et al, 2010). For example, this knowledge can indicate which communities are heavily represented, and moderators can tailor content to these groups.…”

Building Library Community Through Social Media

“…3 Li and Li similarly observe that there "seems to be some confusion regarding what exactly social media is." 4 Social media has been experimented with and identified variously as a tool for enhancing the image of libraries, 5 as a digital listening post, 6 or as an intelligence gathering tool. 7 With such a variety of perspectives and approaches, the discussion around social media in libraries has been somewhat disjointed.…”

Historically Black Colleges and University Libraries' Utilization of Twitter for Patron Engagement: An Exploratory Study

“…There is very little empirical evidence, which supports academic libraries' expenditure of time and labor in support of social media platforms, nor is there a clear linkage between library social media activities and patron engagement. While information science researchers have begun to study various iterations of Twitter use at academic libraries, most of this literature consists of latent content analysis on library-generated social media data (Aharony, 2010;Cuddy, Graham, & Morton-Owens, 2010;Del Bosque, Leif, & Skarl, 2012).…”